Suppose you do not like your DNA? Let's write about it!

Bad blood: Hermann Goering's great-niece reveals that she had herself sterilized rather than risk giving birth to 'a monster' as relatives of infamous Nazis reveal how their family ties have blighted them. Reported in The Daily Mail.

An Interview With Nazi Leader Hermann Goering's Great-Niece
How do you cope with evil ancestry? Echo interview published in The Atlantic Magazine
By Roc Morin

DNA- the fabric of life

 
"After the last right turn," Bettina's directions read, "you will see a driveway on the left about 50 feet from the corner. The number 290 is placed on a fence post. (Many people can't seem to see this sign and go to the end of the road where they get shot, game lost!)"

It was a dark little joke, the kind of gallows humor I got used to hearing as an EMT and war correspondent--professions overly preoccupied with mortality. The attitude fit Bettina Goering well. As great-niece of Nazi Germany's second in command, Hermann Goering, death is her family legacy.

I tracked the 56 year-old down in Santa Fe at the office where she works as an acupuncturist living under the surname of her ex-husband, which she didn't want named in this story. Bettina invited me to her home outside the city for a formal interview. The last eight miles of the drive took nearly an hour as I bounded and jerked over a tangle of third-world roads, trailing a comet tail of dust. It had rained hard the week before, forcing the persistently barren land to yield lush displays of green, with only cows and horses around to enjoy it."When I see Hermann as a family person, I think he's really nice, and charming, and incredibly caretaking, and it's hard for me to see flaws. But then you see what he does in politics and how he killed people, including his so-called friends."

Bettina met me at the door of her modern two-story home. "You found it!" she exclaimed in her heavy German accent.

"No one's more surprised than me!" I replied with a laugh. "This place seems to want to stay lost."

She led me to her kitchen where her husband of 23 years, Adi Pieper, sat behind a table. We shook hands. The house was nearly empty: no clutter, no personal items. It seemed to be a place without memory. I later learned that the couple was in the process of selling their property and had purposefully made it neutral.


"So," I began, "you had the name Goering when you were growing up in Germany. Was there a stigma?"

"Not really," Bettina replied. "That is the weird thing. Because I grew up in the 50s and early 60s, there was this time of utter denial. Germany had just dug itself out of its past and they were starting to get wealthy again. Later, there were a few people who would make me cringe by saying Hermann was a good guy."

"My mother said that," Adi added, "'Oh, we all loved him,' she said, when she found out Bettina and I were starting a relationship. He was the most liked one, the most popular Nazi. He appeared so royal, so nice."

"Like a big child," Bettina added.

"You've met with the children of Holocaust survivors and have spoken publicly about your family history. Why do you feel that you have to embrace this Goering identity?" I asked.

"It was never a choice," she replied. " That's how I choose to deal with conflicts."

"What about the rest of your family, growing up?"

"I had trouble at home. That's the gist of the matter. My parents were always a bit rocky together, their relationship. But, when I was about 10 or 11 my grandmother from my father's side--the Goering side--moved in because she was very sick. That created so much more drama. She was the Nazi in the family and she was very difficult to deal with. She was in the last stages of syphilis, and that makes you very stuck in your ways. Your pupils don't move anymore, for example. They just stay in one stage. I think it literally eats up your brain. So, she made whatever trouble was there before even worse. I left home at the age of 13 after a fight with my dad."

"What kind of things did she believe?"

"It's hard to just put it in a few words. She had always this upper-class demeanor, that you think you're better than everyone."

"Not to mention that the Holocaust never happened," Adi interjected. "'All lies! All lies!'"

"It came up," Bettina continued. "because we watched a documentary on TV. It was about Auschwitz."

"Was that your first knowledge of the Holocaust?"

"That was one of them for sure."

"How did you feel?"

"I felt horrible! I felt even more horrible she'd deny it. And she was part of it. If anyone was part of it, she was."

"How so?"

"Well, she was very close to Hermann and she was in charge of the Red Cross. She should have known, you would think. I mean, they made Theresienstadt for the Red Cross. They built it in such a way with false walls and everything so that it looked like a nice working camp where they had theater groups and all kinds of stuff."

"Right," I added, "that was their showpiece concentration camp to demonstrate that the Nazis were humanitarians. Of course, they shipped off half the prisoners to Auschwitz before visitors came so it wouldn't look overcrowded."

(- 12 January 1893 – D- 15 October 1946) was a German politician, military leader and convicted Nazi war criminal.

"Maybe she believed the fantasy. At the same time, we found out later that she did some very shady deals with Jewish people who paid their way out of Germany. Hermann Goering did a bunch of deals for art or land."

"Did your grandmother have a good side?"

"I really judged this family as negative, almost all of them. That's something that I've been now working to change, and I'm seeing a much more complex picture even of my grandmother. It's very illuminating."

"What changed?"

"I did research. My grandmother was brought up in a family where all the men died all the time. They were all military. Her father died when she was five. There were so many wars back then."

"Yes, you can imagine that with so much loss in her life, she had to convince herself it was for something worthwhile."

"Exactly."

"Do you see any goodness in Hermann?"

"That's hard to say. Is somebody ever totally bad or good? I hope not. I think certain circumstances happen that might turn somebody into a psychopath. When I see Hermann as a family person, I think he's really nice, and charming, and incredibly care taking, and it's hard for me to see flaws. But then you see what he does in politics and how he killed people, including his so-called friends."

"What do you mean?"

"Are you familiar with the Röhm Putsch?"

"You mean when the Nazis purged the army?"

"That shocked me almost more than some of his later actions, because they were his friends. He had no qualms to shoot just anybody."

"Are you afraid that you inherited some of his traits?"

"Yes and no. I met a cousin that I hadn't seen in nearly 50 years and we both have big qualms to do anything too big--to be in a position of any power because there is something in the background that you could do something bad."

"And you have the desire for power?"

"No, not even. But, it's happened. I'm somebody who naturally takes charge, who can easily be in charge of people, but it scares me at the same time that I could abuse the power as he did. It's a collective consciousness thing. It might be in my DNA. I think they're starting to prove that all the experiences of your ancestors manifest themselves in the DNA."

"Interesting," I said. "I have Jewish friends who have dreams of being in the Holocaust."

"That's what I mean. It's in your DNA somewhere. Sometimes I get feelings that I cannot explain. I experience also the Holocaust. Do we have past lives? How come I have visions of that too?"

"Can you describe that experience?"

"We were in Weimar a few years ago, next to Buchenwald, one of the concentration camps. It was like these ghosts had attached themselves to me. Afterwards I couldn't eat."

"What did it feel like?"

"Like I wasn't myself. I was really depressed, afraid. I had a vision of being in a small attic room, it could have been in Germany, afraid for my life. I personally think there are past lives for sure."

"So, the implication is that you were a Jew in another life?"

"Or somebody who was persecuted, or a member of the resistance."

"Getting back to the issue of DNA, I wanted to ask you about your decision to sterilize yourself. Were you worried about continuing Hermann's legacy?"

"It's complex. I was about 30 when I did it. I was living in a commune with Osho in Pune, India and a lot of people did it in that commune. There are too many kids in the world, so I won't have any. My brother did it too."

"So, it wasn't specifically the Goering genes?"

"No. However, when my brother did it he said, 'I cut the line.' He's dramatic like that. And when he said that, it became clear to me that that must have influenced me too. I had a fear about my own power to maybe pass something on."

"What was it like living in the Osho commune?"

"There were a lot of Germans, Jews, and Japanese there. It was the 70s and it was like the kids of World War II all came together in a friendly way. And some of it was in encounter groups where you lived out some of these old experiences."

"What kind of experiences?"

Bettina glanced at her husband.

"For example," Adi offered, "I'm from Berlin, so I'm Prussian. They had me stand up and march and they all threw pillows at me, yelling 'You fucking Nazi!' They called me Obersturmbannführer and I had to just take that all in. They asked, 'How do you feel about that? That's what your parents did and that's what you are because you are their child.' And I felt a big collective guilt inside that I wasn't aware of. Nobody in my family did anything, but I still have this guilt. I didn't know I had it. I was so surprised."

"Were you able to get past it?"

"It's never totally past. You just put awareness to it so that it has no more power over you."

"Is that part of what coming to America represents--a clean start?"

"Part of it."

"So, having left Germany, do you still participate in German culture?"

"For sure," replied Adi. "We go to the opera..."

"Wagner?" I queried.

"No."

"When you say no, is that a reaction against the music or the composer?"

"No, I think it's nice music. It's really good. But, he was an anti-Semite."

"So, even musical notes can accumulate guilt?"

"Quite amazing."

"What else do you have from Germany?" I asked, turning back to Bettina. "Any heirlooms from Hermann?"

"Just photographs of him with my father and grandmother. I have a Goering insignia ring, which I actually wear. I inherited it from my mom when she died."

When I asked to see the photographs, Bettina pulled out an album and began to flip through.

"What do you see when you look at these photographs?" I asked.

"Different things. These are a bunch of my uncles--the brothers of my father who died so young. I've developed almost a relationship to them. It's funny. I got to know them or something. I feel like they are asking me to remember them."

"You got to know them through the photographs?"

"Yes, though sometimes I wonder if I should get rid of this album. I'm the only one who has any relation to these guys. Nobody else does. My brother doesn't and we're the last of the line."

"Can you talk more about the relationship you've developed with these images?"

"So, I had an illumination about the boy," she said, pointing at a photograph of her uncle, Peter Goering. "He was only a boy. He was 19. As I got to know more about them, I felt really bad. I felt the grief of losing them so young--of my father and my grandmother--I felt that."

"And what do you see when you look at the pictures of them with Hermann?"

"He's very proud of them, and they are proud of him. You can tell."

"You can see in the picture how much they love each other?"

"Yeah, yeah, for sure."

"Do you see a resemblance between Hermann and yourself?'

"Sure--cheekbones, nose, even the mouth. I was a teenager when I first saw a photograph of him before he got fat, back when he was young, and I took a deep breath."

"How did you feel?"

"I was shocked. I ripped it up. I was like, 'Fuck, is that me?”

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/an-interview-with-nazi-leader-hermann-goerings-great-niece/280579/#:~:text=Roc%20Morin%20is%20a%20journalist%20based%20in%20San%20Francisco%20and%20the%20curator%20of%20the%20World%20Dream%20Atlas.

Let's Write about feeding people!

I enjoyed reading this article about the meeting between Ron Howard and Chef Jose Andres: José Andrés Feeds Ron Howard & Then Feeds Him Some More in The New Yorker, article by Patrick Radden Keefe.

The two friends discuss their new documentary, “We Feed People,” and how the chef’s World Central Kitchen has served twenty million hot meals to displaced Ukrainians since February.

NEW YORK:  Academy award winning film maker Ron Howard was famished when he met the chef José Andrés on the High Line Park (New York) the other morning. “Are we eating at this place of yours?” Howard asked, as Andrés came barreling over, a little bleary from travelling but revving up to his standard tempo of volubility. He steered Howard down some stairs and across Thirtieth Street to his restaurant, Mercado Little Spain. (Julie's note- check the restaurant's website to view the menu. Deliciously "wow"!)

It was still closed, so Andrés hammered on the door with the assurance of a man who owns the place. A staffer opened up, and Andrés guided his guest to a booth.

You want eggs?” he asked.

Sitting down, he said, “It’s been a complicated seventy days.” Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Andrés—who is built like a bull, with a trim white beard and mirthful eyes—has been on the ground in the region with his relief organization, World Central Kitchen, serving meals to people affected by the war. But a previous commitment meant that he had to commute from the war zone to Spain, where he was making a TV show. “I’m an expert on in-and-out-of-Ukraine,” he said. “Nobody crosses the border quicker.”
Food arrived: platters of eggs and pisto (an earthy tomato stew), sliced Manchego (a cheese made in the La Mancha region of Spain from the milk of sheep), Catalan tomato bread, slivers of Ibérico ham. “The ultimate ham,” Andrés said. Howard, who is rail thin, with a resting face that projects a boyish geniality, seemed delighted with the spread. But Andrés assured him, “Is more coming.”

Howard met Andrés six or seven years ago. 

Howard said that he was taken with the chef’s charisma, and also fascinated by his expanding efforts with World Central Kitchen. He was struck by the speed with which Andrés and his collaborators could parachute into a place after a flood or an earthquake and start serving hot meals. “They’re built almost like a fire department,” he said. A colleague had suggested to him that Andrés should win the Nobel Peace Prize. Howard wanted to make a documentary about the chef’s philanthropy. Andrés was skeptical at first. His relief work requires speed and autonomy (“The war in Ukraine started February 24th,” he said. “On the twenty-fifth, we were serving meals”); a camera crew would slow him down. But as he got to know Howard he softened. “A lunch here, a dinner there, a glass of wine under the moon,” Andrés recalled, adding, “How can you not like Ron Howard?”

Howard, who has directed more than thirty movies, sees some affinities between filmmaking and the work that Andrés does, even if the stakes are lower in Hollywood. “I love collaborators. So does he,” Howard said. “He wants to work with people and build on their energy.” In the documentary, called “We Feed People,” which premières on Disney+, on May 27th, Howard captures Andrés’s ability to step off a plane into chaos, find some resourceful locals, and organize them into a relief army. “Every restaurant in the world, they’re part of World Central Kitchen,” Andrés said. “They just don’t know it.”

As filming began, Howard learned that several of Andrés’s collaborators from the earliest days—in Haiti, after the 2010 earthquake—had been chronicling everything on video. “They had so much great footage,” he said. The spirit of friendly collaboration was infectious. When Howard’s crew arrived in the Navajo Nation to document Andrés’s COVID-relief efforts, they found themselves distributing truckloads of supplies, rather than filming.

Mercado’s staff began raising the garage-style doors, and then sunlight and customers streamed in. More food arrived: sandwiches of smoked salmon and scrambled egg. Andrés is an irrepressible raconteur, and he’s always moving when he talks. He jabs you in the arm to make sure he has your attention; he lifts the top from your salmon sandwich and stuffs in some Ibérico and Manchego, because he feels strongly that it tastes better that way. Each time a plate hit the table, he said, “Is more coming.”

On his phone, he showed Howard a map of the Ukraine operation. “We are doing three hundred and fifty to four hundred thousand meals a day,” he said. World Central Kitchen has spread into eight countries, to contend with the widening outflow of refugees. By its count, twenty million meals have been served since February. He pulled up a photo of a food truck he’d commandeered: “It was secondhand, parked in Kyiv, a food truck nobody was using.” After some repairs, the truck was churning out meals. 

What impressed Howard most was the spirit of volunteerism on the ground, even from those whose lives had been devastated. “It’s very therapeutic for people to activate,” he said. “But they need structure. They need somebody to say, ‘Hey, we could use some help.’ ” 

A plate of xuixo (fried cream-filled croissants) arrived, and a round of ensaïmada, a Majorcan sweet bread. Howard asked Andrés about a potato dish that he had encountered while scouting “In the Heart of the Sea,” in the Canary Islands.

“Papas arrugadas,” (also known as "wrinkled potatoes") Andrés said, and flagged down his chef, to see if the restaurant had any. No dice.
“That’s O.K.!” Howard said, relieved. “I’m full.” ♦

Let's write about the Milky Way!

First Photo of The Milky Way’s Black Hole Revealed 5/12/22 Transcript:  Astronomers from the Event Horizon Telescope project unveil an image of our galaxy’s black hole, called Sagittarius A* on 5/12/22. (Summary- "Einstein was right all along!)

First Photo of The Milky Way’s Black Hole Revealed 5/12/22

Good morning everyone. And thank you for being here while we share with you our exciting new results about our galaxy, the Milky Way. Our home in this universe, what fills our night sky on a dark summer night. At its heart towards the constellation Sagittarius is Sagittarius A*, the super massive black hole suspected to reside there. 

A source that has been a focus of intense astronomical studies for decades. Observations of stars orbiting around it reveal the presence of an object that is very massive, 4 million times the mass of our sun, but also very faint.

For me personally, I met it 20 years ago and have loved it and tried to understand it since. But until now, we didn’t have the direct picture confirming that Sgr A* was indeed a black hole. Today the Event Horizon Telescope is delighted to share with you the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*.

An image shows a bright ring surrounding the darkness, the telltale sign of the shadow of the black hole. Light escaping from the hot gas swirling around the black hole appears to us as the bright ring. Light that is too close to the black hole, close enough to be swallowed by it, eventually crosses its horizon, and leaves behind just the dark void in the center. Getting to this image wasn’t an easy journey. Excuse me. It was one of building a worldwide telescope array and a global collaboration. One of getting and processing petabytes of data collected from those telescopes, of imaging algorithms more complex than many that have ever been developed. What made it extra challenging was the dynamic environment of Sgr A*.  A source that verbaled and gurgled as we looked at it. And the challenges of looking not only… ( Ooops! Something is advancing the slides without… Can you please go back to the earlier slides? Okay. Okay. Let’s see if this will work.)

What made it extra challenging was the dynamic environment of Sgr A*, a source that verbaled and gurgled as we looked at it. And the challenges of looking not only through our own atmosphere, but also through the gas clouds in the disc of our galaxy towards the center. It took several years to refine our image and confirm what we had, but we prevailed. The HD collaboration has indeed been hard at work, imaging black holes with exquisite resolution using new techniques.

In 2019, we revealed the very first such image, that of the super massive black hole in the M87 Galaxy. That black hole is 1,500 times more massive, making its horizon 1,500 times larger. But it is also 2,000 times further away from us. This makes the two images appear very similar to us when we gaze at them in the sky. But the two black holes couldn’t have been different from each other in practically every other way. The one in M87 is accumulating matter at a significantly faster rate than Sgr A*, but perhaps more importantly, the one in M87 launches a powerful jet that extends as far as the edge of that galaxy. Our black hole does not.

And yet, when we look at the heart of each black hole, we find a bright ring surrounding the black hole shadow. It seems that black holes like donuts. I wish I could tell you that second time is as good as the first when imaging black holes, but that wouldn’t be true. It is actually better. Now we know that it wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t some aspect of the environments that happen to look like the ring that we expected to see. We now know that in both cases, what we see is the heart of the black hole, the point of no return.

These two images look similar because they’re the consequence of fundamental forces of gravity. Space time, the fabric of the universe warps around black holes in exactly the same way, regardless of their mass or what surrounds them. This is what we had expect… Hope to find, given the predictions of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. And it is exactly because of this fact that we are able to use these new observations, the image of Sgr A* to perform one of the strongest tests of general relativity to date. What was remarkably helpful to us when performing this test was the amount of information we already had about Sgr A* before our observations. The astronomy community has monitored for decades the motion of stars around the dark center of the galaxy. By tracing these orbits, we have come to know the mass of the black hole with extreme precision.

That allowed us to make a prediction for how big the image and the black hole shadow should be. If Einstein’s theory is right, with no wiggle room and no parameters to adjust, the only way to change the size of the shadow is if we changed the theory. And what we found was that our image was in very close agreement with theoretical predictions. These observations leave us very little freedom to change Einstein’s theory of gravity. Now we have two laboratories in the sky, M87 and Sgr A* for exquisite tests of extreme environments. We learned so far that we understand gravity pretty well. But as you will hear later, as sophisticated as our simulations are, we discovered that we still have a ways to go with modeling their turbulent environments. 

Now I’d like to introduce Vincent Fish from MIT Haystack Observatory, who is going to tell us how this was accomplished.

Russian media finally disclosing military weaknesses in the Ukraine

MOSCOW- "This discussion is well choreographed. They are preparing the public for an unpleasant reality. Skabeyeva is throwing up the hot emotional arguments and Khodarenok is gently shooting them down. Just one of several acts in this storyline. Story to be continued."

Retired Russian Colonel Mikhail M. Khodaryonok

An international echo essay published in The New York Times, by Neil MacFarquhar and Anushka Patil

A military analyst on one of Russian state television’s most popular networks left his fellow panelists in stunned silence on Monday when he said that the conflict in Ukraine was deteriorating for Russia, giving the kind of honest assessment that is virtually banished from the official airwaves.

"'The whole world is against us': Retired colonel gives damning assessment of Russia's war in Ukraine on state TV as he urges Putin to 'get out of' the conflict."- The Daily Mail

“The situation for us will clearly get worse,” Mikhail M. Khodaryonok, a retired colonel and a conservative columnist on military affairs, said during the “60 Minutes” talk-show program on the Rossiya network.

It was a rare moment of frank analysis in a country where criticizing the war effort can result in a prison sentence and broadcasters have generally adhered to the Kremlin’s talking points.

Extraordinary exchange on Russian state TV’s top talk show about Ukraine. Military analyst & retired colonel Mikhail Khodarenok tells anchor Olga Skabeyeva “the situation for us will clearly get worse…we’re in total geopolitical isolation…the situation is not normal.

The problems that Mr. Khodaryonok referred to, sometimes obliquely, included low morale, the array of Western countries aligned against Russia and the amount of fighters and matérial that Ukraine was assembling.

“We are in total geopolitical isolation and the whole world is against us, even if we don’t want to admit it,” said Mr. Khodaryonok, noting that Russia’s “resources, military-political and military-technical, are limited.”

He urged Russians not to take “informational sedatives.” The clip was first highlighted by Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring, which tracks Russian broadcasts. 

Mr. Khodaryonok did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.

Aside from questioning Russia’s position, it was a remarkable moment because Mr. Khodaryonok noted that Ukraine seemed to have momentum. Russians mistakenly tended to try to extrapolate the problems of a few soldiers in the Ukrainian Army to denigrate its whole military, he said. 

Ukraine's momentum with promise of counteroffensives

In reality, they were ready to field a million men if given sufficient weapons, were highly motivated and would be receiving an increasing quantity of military support from the United States and Europe, he added.

News talk shows in Russia are generally a shouting match, with the half dozen panelists each vying to drown out the others. On this episode, however, the other panelists stood in stunned silence. Only Olga Skabeyeva, the host, who religiously follows the Kremlin line, interrupted with official talking points in sometimes tense exchanges.

She attempted to point out that support from China and India was just as good as support from Europe, that perhaps professional soldiers were superior to conscripts and that Russia “had no choice,” the standard Kremlin justification for its invasion by presenting Ukraine as a threat.




Mr. Khodaryonok seemed to be careful not to say anything openly critical of the Russian side, repeatedly stressing that the entire situation was “not normal.” When it came to morale issues, for example, he reached back into history and noted that Marx and Lenin had said that high morale was an important factor for battlefield success. He did not refer directly to recent indications that the Russian Army is suffering from morale problems.

In March, Russia criminalized denouncing its war effort, including even referring to it as a war rather than a “special military operation.”

Mr. Khodaryonok has been critical of the Russian military operations in the past. In an unusual column published in early February, before the invasion, he cautioned against it, saying that it would not be the cake walk that many Russian analysts expected and that it was not in Russia’s “national interests.”

He predicted accurately that the Ukrainians would fight hard to defend their country and that the West would provide extensive arms. “There will be no blitzkrieg in Ukraine,” he wrote in Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, a Russian weekly newspaper supplement on military matters.

Even earlier, about a year after Russia dispatched its military to Syria in 2015 to prop up President Bashar al-Assad, he wrote a column for an internet news service, Gazeta.Ru, suggesting that the Syrian Army was an unworthy ally, pointing out its lack of military success and corruption.

Concerning the war in Ukraine, however, he has previously praised the Russian effort.

In comments on his Telegram channel posted only a week ago, he said that military theorists for years to come would study the special operation as something “unique.” He said Russian advances in the eastern Donbas region were due to the discipline, training, morale of its military, as well as the effectiveness of its artillery. He also repeated the unfounded Russian claim that the Ukrainian side fostered Nazis.

West says Russians are losing momentum in Ukraine

Neil MacFarquhar is a national correspondent. Previously, as Moscow bureau chief, he was on the team awarded the 2017, Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. He spent more than 15 years reporting from around the Mideast, including five as Cairo bureau chief, and wrote two books about the region. @NeilMacFarquhar

Anushka Patil is a senior social media editor. @anushkapatil

Let's Write about Scott and Zelda in France!

Were F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda ever happy?

Their love story still sizzles! 

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul Minnesota in 1896. He and Zelda were married in New York City's Saint Patrick's Cathedral, in 1920.

This essay was published in the France Today electronic magazine (Ezine).  To be honest, although I realize how infamous (or famous- depending how the couple's biographers might frame their lives) are and remain to this day, I was unaware about how their lives together were tumultuous, to say the least. I suspect the experiences described in this article about when F. Scott and his wife Zelda were in France, might have been some of their (sort of) happiest years together.  

Back in 1922, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald rented a house in Great Neck Estates, West Egg, Long Island, a relatively modest home compared with the sumptuous East Egg mansions of Sands Point, where The Great Gatsby’s Daisy and Tom Buchanan lived. 

Drawing on his own experiences, Fitzgerald wrote short stories in a room above the garage. While his characters took shape, he and Zelda were busy burning cash, heedless that their newly extravagant lifestyle might be more ruinous than they imagined. The endless partying (often with his buddy and neighbor, Ring Lardner, a sports columnist and satirical short story writer) also kept Scott from concentrating on his new novel.

Tipped off by writer Edith Wharton that the palm-shaded, sleepy town of Hyères was an enchanting place to settle down, the couple found it too staid and swarming with dreary British pensioners. Instead, they rented a charming white villa, further down the coast, on a tranquil pine-shaded hillside in Saint-Raphaël – “a little red town built close to the sea, with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it”. It was here, at the Villa Marie, that Scott cloistered himself to work on Gatsby, while Zelda spent long, idle afternoons at the beach, where she met a young French aviator, Édouard Jozan. Her passionate but short-lived affair with Jozan (recounted in Zelda’s semi-autobiographical novel, Save me the Waltz) soon put a strain on their marriage. Blame it on the dazzling landscape: the Riviera is “a seductive place,” wrote Zelda, “where the blare of the beaten blue and those white palaces shimmering under the heat accentuates hings”. 

Needing distraction, the Fitzgeralds would often set out in their little blue Renault along the red rock coastal road to the Cap d’Antibes, where their American friends, Sara and Gerald Murphy were staying.

Gerald, heir to the Mark Cross luxury leather goods company and a visionary painter, and Sara, a mid-western beauty who was believed to have been Picasso’s secret muse, may be best known as Fitzgerald’s initial models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) with Zelda (Sayre) Fitzgerald (1900-1948)

Zelda was dubbed by her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald as "the first American flapper". She and Scott became emblems of the Jazz Age, for which they are still celebrated.

Everyone gravitated towards the Murphys, stylish, charismatic trendsetters who attracted a charmed circle of friends that included the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos, Rudolf Valentino, Fernand Léger, Serge Diaghilev and Pablo and Olga Picasso. They hosted elaborate picnics on the powdery sand of the then-deserted La Garoupe beach to the tune of Gerald’s latest jazz ballads on a portable phonograph, slathered themselves with cocoa butter, sunbathed and swam in the turquoise shallows (although allegedly, fair-skinned Scott preferred to lie in the shade, nursing a bottle of gin). Zelda, later remembered by the Murphy’s daughter, Honoria, as “blonde and soft and tanned by the sun”, was strikingly beautiful and always had a peony in her hair or pinned to her dress.

That summer, the Murphys set up headquarters in the empty pink seaside Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc – now one of the most iconic glitzy hotels on the Riviera – convincing the owner, Antoine Sella, to keep it open for them while their new home, the Villa America, was being built nearby. While Gerald entertained his friends with ritual cocktails (ingredients called for “the juice of a few flowers”), his guests Scott and Zelda would often liven up evenings with alcohol-fuelled antics that included diving off 11m-high rocks into a dark sea, or inciting guests to skinny dip in the pool. On another, more sobering occasion, Zelda swallowed a dangerous quantity of sleeping pills and walked around the hotel grounds all night.

In summer 1926, in the wake The Great Gatsby’s roaring success, the Fitzgeralds rented the Villa Saint-Louis in Juan-les-Pins to be close to the Murphys. It was “a big house on the shore with a private beach near the casino”, where Scott would work on the first chapters of Tender is the Night.

A vintage postcard of the Belles Rives hotel

Three years later, the villa was sold and transformed into a family-owned Art Deco mini-palace, Hôtel Belles Rives, whose 1920s décor has been meticulously preserved by the current owner, Marianne Estène-Chauvin. “Out of all the anecdotes passed down from generation to generation, my favourite is when Scott lured a local jazz band inside the villa and then locked them in a bedroom upstairs, and forced them to play dance music all night,” she says. Today, the hotel’s Fitzgerald Bar conjures up the Jazz Age; you’d almost expect to see Scott, hunched over a gin fizz, puffing on his Chesterfields, making notes. 

For the Fitzgeralds – self-avowed “excitement eaters” – there was no better place for a glamorous jaunt than Monte Carlo. The couple would take the Grande Corniche, “through the twilight with the whole French Riviera twinkling below” and spend the evening at the casino. If Scott had forgotten his passport, he’d pretend to faint in front of the gambling room, hoping that they would somehow let him in. When it came to restaurants, fine cuisine was never a priority for Scott, who preferred club sandwiches and abhorred garlic. However, the artists’ haunt, La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence was the place to be seen, even then. One evening, Scott spotted Isadora Duncan at the next table and went to pay her court. Outraged, Zelda showed her jealousy by plunging down a flight of stone steps.

(??? OMG)


Don’t miss your chance to dine at La Colombe d’Or

Return to America: In 1929, the Fitzgeralds spent their last summer on the Riviera. When the Stock Market crashed in the autumn of that year, the gaiety was gone. Living in a villa in a less fashionable part of Cannes, the Fitzgeralds now avoided the Hôtel du Cap, a celebrity circus where silk-clad matrons used the pool “only for a short hangover dip”.

By this time, Zelda, who was doggedly working at becoming a ballerina, was showing signs of mental strain, and their cash was running low. Still, that didn’t stop the Fitzgeralds from exploring Nice, staying at the Hôtel Beau Rivage on the seafront, where “they were serving blue twilights at the cafés along the Promenade des Anglais for the price of a porto and we danced their tangos and watched girls shiver in the appropriate clothes for the Côte d’Azur”. They also went to “the cheap ballets of the Casino on the jetée” and dined on salade niçoise. Venturing as far as Menton, they ordered a bouillabaisse “in an aquarium-like pavilion by the sea across from the Hotel Victoria”. By the time Tender is the Night was published in 1934, the Fitzgeralds had been back in America for three years. Zelda’s mental health had declined and tragic events would mar their happiness, but the golden glow of those endless summers on the Côte d’Azur remained.

Vintage postcard from the Hôtel Belles Rives

Fortunately, some things never change. Take, for instance, Fitzgerald’s rhapsodic description of the shimmering Mediterranean, published in 1924, in The Saturday Evening Post: “the fairy blue of Maxfield Parrish’s pictures: blue like blue books, blue oil, blue eyes, and in the shadow of the mountains a green belt of land runs along the coast for a hundred miles and makes a playground for the world. The Riviera!”

The Hôtel Beau Rivage in Nice back in the day

Today, many of the Fitzgeralds’ stomping grounds are still going strong. The Hôtel Belles Rives remains an elegant Art Deco gem, with a superb restaurant, private beach and waterskiing school; in Nice, the Hôtel Beau Rivage is a stylish hotel with a terrific beach restaurant. If you’re feeling flush after a night at the Monte Carlo Casino, head for the Hôtel-du-Cap-Eden-Roc for their signature Bellini cocktail or dine at the terrace Grill Eden-Roc, overlooking the legendary pool carved out of the rock (www.hotel-du-cap- eden-roc.com). At the far corner of La Garoupe beach, the beau monde flocks to La Plage Keller for toes-in-the-sand dining, featuring Mediterranean classics. After lunch, head to Villa Eilenroc, the Belle-Époque home once owned by the Count and Countess Étienne de Beaumont, whose lavish fêtes Scott and Zelda attended. 

No one leaves the Côte d’Azur without dining at La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, surrounded by original works by the great masters. And if you’re a true Fitzgerald fan, rent his former digs Villa Marie in Saint-Raphaël and scribble your own masterpiece.

From France Today magazine

The Belles Rives today

Lead photo credit : Images © John Michel Sordello, Jean-luc Guillet, Hôtel Belles Rives; Alamy

More in Fitzgeralds, French Riviera, Great Gatsby, Hôtel Belles Rives, Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc

Scott and Zelda were buried in Rockville, Maryland — originally in the Rockville Union Cemetery, away from his family plot.  At their daughter Scottie's* request, her parents were later interred with the other Fitzgeralds at Saint Mary's Catholic Cemetery, in Rockville. Inscribed on their tombstone is the final sentence of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

*Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald was an American writer and journalist and the only child of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. She worked for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Northern Virginia Sun, and others, and was a prominent member of the Democratic Party.

Let's write about religious martyrs

 Catholic Man of the Month of April, 2022 - echo report published in the April Columbia Magazine. 

For five decades, after World War II, the Soviet Union attempted to erase the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. But, the underground UGCC became the largest illegal Christian community in the world and remained steadfast through the indomitable witness of leaders like Bishop Mykola (Nichola) Charnetsky.

Blessed Bishop Charnetsky a Greek Catholic martyr (1884-1959)

Born into a devout peasant family in western Ukraine, Charnetsky felt called to the priesthood at a young age. After studies in Rome, he was ordained in 1909, and became a seminary professor and spiritual director in Ivano-Frankivsk. In 1919, Father Charnetsky joined the missionaries of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer and worked zealously for the reconciliation of Catholics and Orthodox, giving popular missions in northwest Ukraine. 

In 1926, Pope Pious XI appointed him apostolic visitor to Greek Catholics in the region. Five years later he was ordained a bishop.

When Soviet forces invaded in 1939, Bishop Charnetsky fled to Lwow, Poland - later Lviv, Poland. In 1945, he was arrested by Soviet secret police as a "Vatican agent" and was sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. According to official records, Bishop Charnetsky underwent 600 hours of interrogation and torture and spent in 30 Soviet prisons and camps over the next 11 years. All the while, he offered comfort and counsel to his fellow prisoners, heard their confessions and he secretly celebrated the Divine Liturgy.

Released from prison at the point of death in 1956, Bishop Charnetsky made a remarkable recovery and served the church for three more years -- a much as by his prayerful presence as by clandestintly preparing and ordaining candidates for the priesthood. He died a martyr, as a result of his suffering, on April 2, 1959.

Together, with 23 martyred companions, Bishop Mykkola Charnetsky was beatified in Lviv, by Saint John Paul II, on June 27, 2001.