Occasionally I take quizzes on Facebook that ask me if I could meet someone who has deceased and have a conversation, who would that person be?
That person has long been Klaus Kinski, the German actor famous for his role in
Nosferatu (that's a real vampire sans the sparkles). When I was in high school, I used to watch an absolute load of crappy B-list horror films on Showtime Beyond, part of the Showtime package that specialized in supernatural flicks and split the pair in two, "Daydreams" during the day that were most fanciful and fairytale esque and "Nightdreams" during the evening/late nights that were either really scary or really laughable in attempting to be scary.
Most Friday nights I spent with the "Nightdreams" and one night, caught this film called
Crawlspace which was about this landlord of an apartment that had a Nazi past and killed the female tenants who lived there. Who better to play the role than Kinski, the man infamous for sparring with director Werner Herzog?
And somehow, within my DNA and genetics, I found the 60 year old man with his deeply white hair and stunning smile to be maddeningly attractive. Let's see...this was during the time that Orlando Bloom was depicted as the teenage girl's dream guy and as usual, I found beauty in the obviously less conventional form.
It was brought to my attention during an Amazon search that Kinski wrote an autobiography about himself and this inspired me to start a laborious search for the out-of-print book. You could buy a used copy for the sum of $72. No joke. That damn thing was expensive.
On the day of my 17th birthday, I struck gold at the public library when I found a copy, hardly worn (!) on the shelf. It was the best birthday gift I've really had in all honesty despite the fact that you know, I don't own it.
That book was insanely dirty. I thought that since I had some Bret Easton Ellis readings under my belt that I would be perfectly fine but it was intense. If you believed everything in the book, you would come away believing that Kinski was nothing but a sex maniac and hardly an actor who starred in over a 100 films.
Apparently the book was fabricated so it wasn't an actual autobiography but the most devastating part occurred for me when I finished reading and decided to IMDB him. Kinski died in 1991 when he was 65 years old. I was only 4 when he died.
I was very quiet after reading that for a couple of days and toted that book from class to class with me all throughout my junior year of high school. It was a staple in my bag until the day came two weeks later when I had to turn it back in to the library. Which I promptly renewed.
What a handsome man. I'll leave you with this humorous ancedote:
Jack Lemmon told me that he was in line at Ace Hardware in Beverly Hills, and the sales clerk kept looking past him. "I may not be the biggest star in the world" he said, "but, jeez, usually when I stand in line, the clerk will notice me. I turned around, and there was Klaus Kinski with an ax."Haha. He would.
Love to you all,
Heather
