Overture of Hope, page 21
On that night—which would be their last together—Krauss and Ursuleac demanded to hear the singers of opera’s glory days. They wanted Rethberg first, and Ida complied, fishing out one of her records from their large collection. “And now, I should like to hear Ponselle,” said Ursuleac, who surprisingly had never heard the American soprano sing. Krauss himself had only heard Ponselle once, many years before. Ida carefully unsheathed her precious recording of La Vestale from its wax-paper sleeve and slowly placed it on the turntable. It was a rarely performed opera by Gaspare Spontini that Ponselle revived for the Metropolitan Opera’s 1925–26 season and sang again at that unforgettable performance in Florence in 1933.
“I can’t tell you how touching and exciting it was playing what we considered the greatest singer of all for the man we considered the greatest judge of all,” continued Ida. At the end of the recording, Krauss turned to everyone and said, “She’s engaged! She’s the best of the lot!” It was a typical Krauss joke, explained Ida, “but contained the highest praise he could give—measuring you against…artists they thought supreme.”
And then as Ida prepared to put on another Ponselle recording, Krauss stood up quite suddenly and took charge. Gripping an invisible baton, he began to “conduct” tenor Giovanni Martinelli and Ponselle in the Nile duet from Aida. “And as though you were standing there following him, you did everything to perfection,” Ida told Ponselle. “They nearly went mad with joy. Then we played the ‘Bois épais’ and Viorica cried.”
“We shall never, never hear anything like that again,” Krauss pronounced, putting down his make-believe baton. “Such a voice and such an art doesn’t come more than once.”
“Don’t you think it was lovely that our dear Krauss, whose opinion we valued above all others, confirmed our own views on the last evening we ever spent with him?” wrote Ida to Ponselle. “It also, I think, gave him the great pleasure to find that, entirely independent of him our judgment was all he could have wished. It was a very happy last evening to remember.”27
Finally, on that distant February evening in the Dolphin Square flat, Krauss left the sisters with a gift—a recording of all the tone poems by Richard Strauss that he had conducted. He signed the album cover, “To my best friends, Ida and Louise, with love—Clemens Krauss.”
My best friends? With love? “We were astounded at the time, for it was most unlike him ever to use such terms,” Ida told Frankenstein. “It was as though he had some sort of premonition and wanted to put the seal on 20 years of loving friendship. You can imagine how much we treasure this now.”28
The following morning, Krauss and Ursuleac left London, and the sisters never saw him again.
“I hope you won’t think us crazy if I tell you, Rosa, that he actually came back to us—to reassure us and comfort us,” wrote Ida. “Do you believe that occasionally this does happen? I have always believed it, but never imagined it happening to us.”29
CHAPTER 12 The Ghosts
Ida and Louise had been fascinated with ghosts their entire lives. From the time their mother told them the story of meeting a troubled phantom at their home in Barnes when they were still young children, they maintained a strong belief in life after death. “They always said that they had their angels who followed them everywhere,” noted one of their friends.1
The Cooks lived with friendly spirits all around them and sought their counsel and even eavesdropped on their busy lives in what they referred to as “the other side.” They were devotees of British medium Leslie Flint, who purported to communicate with famous historical figures, including Frédéric Chopin and Oscar Wilde, during seances at his London home. It was not unusual for them to sit in a circle in the dark for hours, holding hands until they were able to communicate with the dead. “We always say it’s just like trying to get the first telephone across the Atlantic,” said Ida in a letter to a friend. “No good sending out signals from Newfoundland (or wherever it was) unless someone sits patiently in Ireland ready to register the first ‘hello!’ It will come!”2
At different sessions, they were able to communicate with their friend Pinza, who died of a stroke in 1957, and Amelita Galli-Curci, who died in 1963. They even managed to speak to their beloved Krauss and once claimed to have overheard the conductor and Richard Strauss in an argument with another composer. The subject was, of course, opera. “Strauss was indignant and Krauss, though he didn’t speak, was backing him up,” the medium said.3
So the sisters were perhaps only mildly surprised when Ida began to receive random reports that Krauss had been present during Ida’s appearance on This is Your Life, which was broadcast in March 1956, nearly two years after his death. According to Ida, four people in different parts of England told her that they saw a man standing next to Ursuleac, who had been flown to London by the show’s producers to appear on the program. The producers had also found some of the Cooks’ refugees who were still living in Britain to appear on the show. The announcer promised the audience “a story more romantic than fiction—a story that might have come straight from the casebook of a modern Scarlet Pimpernel,” likening the Cooks’ adventures in the Reich to those of the fictional aristocrat who went undercover to save his French counterparts from the guillotine in eighteenth-century France.4
Ida first heard about the apparition months after the broadcast when an elderly woman approached her after a lecture she gave at the Women’s Institute in Surrey. The woman told Ida that she had loved the program, especially the couple “with the refugee work.” Ida assured her there were no couples on the program and left it at that. But later, on a trip to Northumberland to visit friends, another woman asked, “Who was the tall, very good-looking foreigner who absolutely dominated the program?” When Ida returned armed with photos of Krauss, the woman positively identified the conductor although she pointed out that his hair was dark not grey. “He was young again, you see,” said the wistful Ida, who believed that Krauss was never far away from her and Louise.5
The year following the This Is Your Life broadcast was a difficult one for Ida and Louise. Not only did they lose their friend Pinza in 1957, but Mitia Mayer-Lismann—the first Jew they’d ever met who was among their first successful cases—died in London after battling a long illness and poverty.
For years before her death, Mayer-Lismann had hired a lawyer to seek restitution from the West German government, largely because she was unable to find steady work after losing her job teaching music at a private school. Not only had she demanded the return of her property in Frankfurt, but she also sought compensation for the suffering the Nazis had inflicted on her and her entire family. Although her lawyer managed to obtain a small pension for her, she was largely unsuccessful; and when she died in early 1957 at the age of seventy-two, she was broke and still fighting for restitution.
The Cook sisters helped Mayer-Lismann, who “earned very, very little” in London. “Their interest and active help when needed never stopped during all the years,” said Else Mayer-Lismann. “The Cook sisters have been and are always there.”6
In addition to their own refugees, many others wanted to thank Ida and Louise for their active help. Still, Ida was rather taken aback when Ella Mahler, a researcher at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, wrote to her in London in 1963. She wanted to know more about the sisters’ work in the Third Reich. Mahler had been contacted by May Sayers, a Jewish philanthropist who knew the Cook sisters and thought they deserved widespread recognition for their bravery. “Ida and Louise Cook established a kind of ‘private’ rescue committee in which they had been the sole promotors, executors and financial supporters,” read the “Proceeding on Collecting Data on Sisters Cooks’ Rescue Work” for the Israeli organization.7
In an introductory letter to Ida, Mahler wrote: “Yad Vashem looks upon your and your sister’s activities as an important chapter in the history of pre-war help extended to the Jews by non-Jews and would like to preserve a detailed account of it.” She added that if the committee voted to name the Cooks “Righteous Among the Nations,” a tree would be planted in their honor along the Avenue of the Righteous, a park at Yad Vashem inaugurated in 1962.8
‘We are fascinated by the possibility of having a tree planted in our name,” wrote Ida in a letter to Mahler dated September 8, 1963. “The idea makes me feel quite tearful.… But meanwhile, thank you so much my dear, for starting this. Even if nothing comes of it, the thought was darling.”9
After Ida provided a partial list of the refugees she and Louise had helped escape the Nazis, Mahler requested more information about their flight from Germany and Austria. Several former refugees paid tribute to the Cooks and told their stories in long, often rambling letters to Mahler, thrilled that both Louise and Ida were being considered for the distinction. In Jerusalem, letters arrived from Lisa Basch, Else Mayer-Lismann, Friedl Bamberger Orlando, Ilse Bauer, Gerda Maliniak, and others. Newspaper clippings and excerpts from Ida’s memoir were all translated into Hebrew and collected in a thick dossier labeled “File #223—Cook Unit.” The file was sent to Israeli jurist Moshe Landau, who had presided over the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in a Jerusalem courtroom two years before.
Landau had studied law in London before the outbreak of the war, and he had no need for the Hebrew-language translations. A refugee from Nazi Germany who had made his way to Palestine in 1933, Landau focused on the halting English of the letters from German, Polish, and Austrian Jews who wrote from England, the United States, and as far away as Brazil to pay tribute to Ida and Louise Cook, who had used opera to cloak their dangerous relief work.
In his capacity as chair, Israel’s Supreme Court President was just beginning to read a great deal about the diplomats, soldiers, and ordinary people who worked in the resistance and risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. But at his first meeting of the Committee for the Righteous at the Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem in 1963, nothing could have prepared Landau for the extraordinary story of how two plucky British music fans saved dozens of Jews from the gas chambers in real-life dramas that resembled the elaborate plots of some of their favorite operas.
“It was curiously enough the love of opera, shared by Louise and Ida from their girlhood on, which started the sisters on their refugee activities,” read the slightly bemused introduction to the Cook Unit dossier. “What originally started as a gesture of goodwill extended by Ida and Louise to their operatic friends, developed into a regular, exciting, but heart-breaking task.” According to the notes in the Cook file, the sisters were “guided by their compassion for the persecuted, and their revulsion against the injustice and brutality of Nazi insanity” to plunge “body and soul into the refugee work.”10
“With infinite patience and humility in the face of so much human misery, they interviewed as many as 10 to 15 people at a time,” wrote Sayers. “This personal contact with the unfortunates helped the sisters to view the problems of the refugees in terms of human beings, not just names and photographs.”11
Landau and his committee of experts needed little time to make a decision on the Cook sisters’ good works, and on July 28, 1964, he signed the Certificate of Recognition of the Yad Vashem Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority honoring “Miss Ida Cook and Miss Louise Cook for their many noble and courageous acts of humanity in rescuing Jews from Germany and from Austria during the dark days of the Nazi regime and in helping them to rebuild their lives in freedom.”12
The sisters were thrilled with the honor, but Ida wanted to make sure that Yad Vashem somehow recognized Krauss as well. In a letter to Mahler, dated March 22, 1964, she pleaded to have Krauss’s nationality corrected to Austrian from German. “He was so very much a Viennese that I think he would want it that way,” said Ida. “Otherwise, I can’t tell you how delighted we are that there should be a record of the fact that he and his wife were the mainspring of our work. So many spiteful and completely untrue things were said of them largely by professional rivals in later years and the issue became rather fogged. It gives us real joy to see tribute paid to them.”13
Although Krauss’s nationality was duly corrected, the conductor was never officially recognized by Yad Vashem or his own country for his role in helping the Cooks save Jews.
Arthur Lourie, the Israeli ambassador to London, presented the awards to the sisters on March 23, 1965, at a special ceremony at the Israeli Embassy. Honoring the Cooks was his last official act as ambassador in London, where he was joined for the ceremony by Britain’s foremost Jewish leaders, including solicitor and Labour Member of Parliament Victor Mishcon. Ida, then sixty and Louise, sixty-three, each wore silky day dresses, pillbox hats, and gloves for the occasion. “Two unobtrusive non-Jewish English spinsters traveled from their quiet suburban home today to receive Israel’s thanks for smuggling 29 Jews out of pre-war Germany,” noted New York Times reporter James Feron on the newspaper’s front page. “They seemed to think it was all unnecessary.”14
But around the world those who had helped them in their relief work rejoiced. “It made me happy for the two of them,” said the soprano Adele Kern, who remained in Germany after the war. “They really deserved it.… They did a lot for the emigrants.”15
Their refugees were also thrilled with the distinction. “When we were given our award at the Israeli Embassy in London, Ilse gave a party in our honor to all her friends in Brazil, on the other side of the world,” said Ida.16 Ilse Bauer, now Ilse Bauer Winter, who had fled to Frankfurt with her mother Irma after Kristallnacht in Vienna, was now happily living in Curitiba, a city in southern Brazil. “We found it immensely touching,” said Ida.17
There was some scattered media attention in England following the ceremony, but the Cooks’ tendency to play down any accomplishments meant that their work was quickly forgotten, relegated to the occasional fundraising luncheon for Israel Bonds in New York City and the Westchester suburbs. Shortly after the Israeli distinction, a woman approached the sisters at one of these events at Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria and asked how many Jews the sisters had saved.
“Twenty-nine, directly,” said Louise.
“Oh, how many!” replied the woman, clearly impressed.
“How very few,” said Ida.18
* * *
“Dear Friends,” wrote Ida in a letter on July 16, 1968, to her new Hollywood acquaintances. “Several times during the last two months we have had to resist the temptation to write to you about this or that aspect of ‘our’ film.”19 Although they were clearly excited about Hollywood’s interest in their wartime adventures, Ida and Louise were also worried. In mostly one-sided correspondence stretching over four years with filmmaker Joshua Logan and producer Fred Kolhmar about a potential biopic, the letter belies an undertone of contretemps, a profound difference of opinion between the demands of Hollywood and the sisters’ desire to protect what to them was surely a sacred story. Ida had already presented her own treatment to Logan and Kolhmar that was passed on to a professional screenwriter and heavily rewritten.
“Our chief criticism would be that the whole thing is a fictional exercise on a true theme. But in the process the real stature of the whole has somehow been reduced.” Ironically, Ida, the romance writer, bristled at “the completely fictitious love story” that anchored the plot. The proposed script involved an opera producer character who “is not a sufficiently olympian (or indeed complex) figure” and his fiancée, who “should be a beastly but attractive girl of the Prussian nobility.”20
A friend had introduced Ida to Joshua Logan, at the time he met the Cooks in the late 1960s one of Hollywood’s greatest producers and directors. He won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1950, sharing the honor with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein with whom he had collaborated on the musical South Pacific, which starred the Cooks’ friend Pinza in the leading role of French planter Emile de Becque. In addition to Pinza, Logan had worked with some of the biggest stars of the day, including Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Bette Davis, and Burt Lancaster. The successful filmmaker behind some of world’s most celebrated musicals had been taken with the odd British sisters and was at first fascinated by the prospect of using their 1930s exploits as material for a melodrama. “We still remember our thrilling day with you and your sister,” Logan wrote to Ida while on location in Oregon where he was filming Paint Your Wagon with Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg in the summer of 1968. “I still long to have a chance to work on your thrilling story.”21
Ida and Louise felt their own real-life narrative with its tense checks at the borders, improbable cover story, and triumphant rescue of artists and their families and friends—in some cases, mere hours before their arrest by the Gestapo—would make a great film, and Ida labored for weeks on her Hollywood-style treatment.
But while their rescue efforts were indeed daring, who would pay to see a movie about two women who were the antithesis of glamor? The question had undoubtedly occurred to Logan and fellow producer Fred Kolhmar, whose last movie before meeting Ida and Louise was How to Steal a Million, a 1966 comedy about an art heist in which its gamine star Audrey Hepburn looked exceptionally chic in Givenchy couture. It’s not clear why Logan and Kohlmar ultimately passed on the Cooks’ story. Perhaps Hollywood studios just weren’t ready to finance a film focused entirely on the heroism of two modest-looking, middle-aged women who faced down evil and won.
Evidently Ida had difficulty trusting someone else to tell the tale, and negotiations with Logan resulted in an impasse. “Ida was very strong willed and very upset that they had assigned someone else to tell her story,” said a friend of the sisters. “She often said it was their story, not someone else’s story to tell.”22 Ida tried various tactics to insert her views into the script. At one point, she even offered to send a tape-recording of her telling the tale. “This sounds dreadfully egotistical, but I do know one can’t possibly retain every detail of a story for months,” she wrote on December 1, 1968, to Joshua Logan and his wife Nedda.23 Ida’s offer to tape the story met with no reply, nor did a letter sent to the Logans four years later on March 5, 1972.
