KINSKI: DEVOURED BY DEMONS

Part One of Two!

This piece previously appeared on salon.com in 2004. 

I had a friend who had a friend who dated Klaus Kinski for a while, toward the end of his life. She had a common name, something like Amanda.

Amanda would hide from Klaus, periodically, at my friend's house. He would call. "AHMAHNDA," his voice would moan, spookily, on the other end of the phone.

"She's not here," my friend would say, as Amanda cringed in silence.

"Vhere is AHMAHNDA?! I vant AMAHNDA," he would demand insanely, as if this normal young woman was the only thing stopping him from plummeting into the infernal chasm.

He'd fuck you on a pile of corpses but he'd never shake your hand, because of the germs. If ego is what makes men miserable, then he was surely one of the most miserable men of all time. There is a line in Nicholas Roeg's "Performance" where Anita Pallenberg is referring to Mick Jagger's character, a has-been. She says of him, "He lost his demon." Klaus never lost his -- he appeared to just keep collecting them. They devoured him and took a heavy toll on anyone close to him.

"I am like a wild animal born in captivity, in a zoo. But where a beast would have claws, I have talent," Kinski said, and his talent mauled many. But, like any great beast, his bright, untamed power was awe-inspiring.

In 1926 in Sopot, Poland, Niskolaus Gunther Nakszynki was born to a wretchedly poor family; young Klaus habitually stole food. When times got too rough, his mother would send him to a nightmarish children's home. During World War II, at age 16, he was drafted into the German army and spent 16 months in a British POW camp.

Perhaps due to these early deprivations, money shot through his hands as he indulged every whim like each day was his last -- so he constantly needed more. He made over 250 films during his career, and turned down over 1,000 with such notable directors as Fellini, Visconti and Pasolini because they weren't paying enough, electing instead to make movies with such colorful titles as "The Strange Tale of Minnesota Stinky," "Naughty Cheerleader," "The Creature With the Blue Hand" and my favorite, "Rendezvous With Dishonor."

His autobiography, "Kinski Uncut" (a title that famously refers to his uncircumcised unit), while an international bestseller, was derided for being absurdly raunchy -- Klaus takes it upon himself to graphically describe dozens of vaginas of his acquaintance. Content notwithstanding, he writes gorgeously and grippingly, with the blazing language of a decadent poet, and always provides fascinating views on situations that he screwed up through his pathological behaviors. "Uncut" is, for all its smut and overindulgence, one of the most compelling autobiographies ever written, and it should be required reading for anyone considering being an actor.

Werner Herzog called it "a work of fiction," but he could hardly be counted on to give an unbiased opinion -- much of the book is a wildly hateful character assassination of Herzog. Regardless of whether or not all the facts were based in reality, the book is precious because Kinski is so scorchingly honest about his impressionistic interpretation of his life -- his confessions, his innermost torments, and how his oversize feelings color-saturated his world.

After the war, Kinski lived on the streets and did theater in Berlin. He was a self-taught actor of merciless discipline. He was a self-taught actor who exercised merciless disciplines on himself; Herzog describes him climbing into a closet and doing strenuous vocal exercises for 10 hours in a row. Kinski began doing films in 1948; by the mid-'60s, he was a recognizable star in America because of "Dr. Zhivago" (1965) and "For a Few Dollars More" (1965).

From "Kinski Uncut":

"What they teach in the acting schools is incredible, hair-raising crap. The Actor's Studio in America is supposed to be the worst. There the students learn how to be natural -- that is, they flop around, pick their noses, scratch their balls. This bullshit is known as 'method acting.' How can you 'teach' someone to be an actor? How can you teach someone how and what to feel and how to express it? How can someone teach me how to laugh or cry? ... What poverty and hunger are? What hate and love are? ... No, I don't want to waste my time with these arrogant morons."

His first great triumph was his solo performance as the woman in Cocteau's "La Voix Humane." He never had much respect for acting and often said he'd have "rather been a whore" and sold his body instead of his feelings.

"At a performance everything works out on its own. I've solved the mystery: You have to submit silently. Open up, let go. Let anything penetrate you, even the most painful things. Endure. Bear up. That's the magic key! The text comes by itself, and its meaning shakes the soul ... You mustn't let scar tissue form on your wounds; you have to keep ripping them open in order to turn your insides into a marvelous instrument that is capable of anything. All this has its price. I become so sensitive I can't live under normal conditions. That's why the hours between performances are the worst."

To relieve his offstage anguish, he was a bona fide, compulsive sex fiend, an addict of the most depraved water. He describes becoming sexually involved with a female doctor, her mother and her sister simultaneously during his "Voix Humane" stint. After ingesting some pills that were "the wrong ones," the enraged doctor admitted Klaus to the hospital as an attempted suicide; he ended up in a straitjacket in Berlin's infamous Wittenau insane asylum.

"My headache gets so unbearable ... the pains get worse and worse. With every shriek from a fellow sufferer ... With every punch from the fists of these slavedrivers. With every dull blow that hits a Jesus Christ. With every gagged and weeping mouth. ... I pray to God. Yes! I pray to God to increase my pains, make them worse and worse! We'll see whether my head bursts. That was how Jesus must have prayed in Gethsemane: 'My God, if you want me to endure all this, then give me the strength!' He gives me the strength. I do not go crazy. I visualize Idea, a linocut by Frans Masereel: A man in prison is illuminated by the idea of freedom coming to his dungeon as a naked woman and squeezing her breasts through the bars so that he may drink and gain strength."

He must have visualized this salvation through the better part of his life, if his autobiography is to be at all trusted -- lust was his main vice and pleasure. At the beginning of the book, he describes being a small child with his mother:

"I inhale her arousing smell ... my lips graze her hot belly and her small, impudent tits until my mouth is on hers."

Later in the book he discusses an adolescent sexual encounter with his sister. Later still, he hints at an incestuous event with daughter Nastassja, who was so aghast she sued him for libel.

"Why am I a whore? I need love! Nonstop! And I want to give love because I have so much of it. No one understands that the sole purpose of my whoring is to spend myself totally!"

Love, for Kinski, was generally a torrid, ill-fated, short-lived and violent affair:

"Anuschka and I fly to Munich and rent a villa in Nymphenburg. Every morning I ride the trolley to rehearsals. At night, we fuck and have fist-fights. Anuschka slices her wrists with a razor in the middle of the street. I bandage her hands with the handkerchief and take her home, where we fuck and fight again."

Kinski dragged a beautiful girl from behind the counter of the glove shop where she worked. "Tell your mother you're with your future husband," he told her to say, that evening.

They were married; a short time later, Nastassja was born, named for the love interest in Dostoyevsky's "Idiot." Unable to be faithful to his innocent, devoted wife, whom he calls "Biggi," for even short stretches of time, Kinski abandoned her and Nastassja, preferring to indulge in a series of short, intense affairs and one-night stands in park bushes. Nastassja felt this abandonment deeply. (A profoundly beautiful, haunted woman, she has sought affairs with older men her entire life: She lived with Roman Polanski at 17 while filming "Tess." She married her manager, 17 years her senior; later, she married Quincy Jones.)

In 1971, Kinski did his most hubris-soaked stage tour: Jesus, playing to huge rock concert arenas in Germany. This was a free-form interpretation of Jesus, with Kinski jabbering into a microphone at top volume, wearing a floral shirt and tight, cock-hugging pants. The audience had come mainly to witness Kinski exploding into violent fits of rage; people would bait him and heckle him from the audience, and Kinski would turn purple with fury, storm offstage, storm back onstage, scream at the audience to fuck off, hurl mike stands, challenge hecklers to fistfights.

"I've come to tell the most exciting story in the history of mankind: the life of Jesus Christ. I'm not talking about the Jesus in those horrible gaudy pictures ... with the jaundice-yellow skin -- whom a crazy society has turned into the biggest whore of all time ... I don't mean the Jesus whose moldy kiss frightens little girls out of horny dreams before their First Communion and makes them die of shame and disgust when they foam in the latrines..."

Foam in the latrines?

"I'm talking about the adventurer, the freest, most fearless, most modern of all men, the one who preferred being massacred to rotting with the others."

Audience members would scream at Kinski that he wasn't Christlike at all, because Christ wasn't violent, Christ wouldn't tell people to shut up...

"Yeah, I've got violence in me, but no negative violence..."

No negative violence?

"My violence is the violence of the free man who refuses to knuckle under. Creation is violent."

In any case, creation was violent for Kinski and anyone who tried to create alongside him. When he began shooting the first film of his legendary collaboration with Werner Herzog, "Aguirre: The Wrath of God," Kinski had just cut short this Jesus tour, welshing on several theatrical contracts. He arrived in the Peruvian jungle, in Herzog's words, "as a derided, misunderstood Jesus ... it was difficult to talk to him because he would answer like Jesus."

Herzog has plenty of extra footage of Kinski being wildly abusive to everyone on the set. Kinski is said to have abused the Indian extras, hitting them in their helmets with his sword and shooting bullets into their hut.

While Herzog paints an unflattering picture of Kinski as a screeching, tyrannical coward, he always paid some level of lip service to his star's phenomenal talent:

"People like Brando are just kindergarten compared to Kinski. He is totally mad and unpredictable. You can see something raging in this man. We liked each other, we hated each other and we respected each other, even though we hatched serious plots to murder each other."

Kinski, at least in his autobiography, did not seem to ever appreciate Herzog, at all:

"[Herzog] just keeps talking and talking and talking ... His speech is clumsy, with a toadlike indolence, long-winded, pedantic, choppy. The words tumble from his mouth in sentence fragments, which he holds back as much as possible, as if they were earning interest. It takes forever and a day for him to push out a clump of hardened brain-snot. Then he writhes in painful ecstasy, as if he had sugar on his rotten teeth ... Even if his throat were cut and his head were chopped off, speech balloons would still dangle from his mouth like gases emitted by internal decay..."

And later, when reporting on Herzog's infamously cavalier attitude toward the physical safety of his cast and crew:

"Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep. His so-called 'talent' consists of nothing but tormenting helpless creatures and, if necessary, torturing them to death or simply murdering them. He doesn't care about anyone or anything except his wretched career as a so-called filmmaker ... For his movies, he hires retards and amateurs who he can push around (and allegedly hypnotize!), and he pays them starvation wages or zilch. He also uses freaks and cripples of every conceivable size and shape, merely to look interesting. He doesn't have the foggiest inkling of how to make movies."

Herzog, according to Kinski, bullied and abused the natives, extras and other actors, not to mention animals and the landscape. Kinski describes Herzog sending a llama down the Pongo rapids on a raft and the crew watching in anguish as the terrified animal got sucked into a whirlpool and died.

"I shriek into his face that I want to see him croak like that llama he executed ... The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! ... No! The huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls, penetrate his asshole and eat his guts!"

If Kinski's demands weren't met during his tantrums, he was famous for breaking contracts. At one point, before the end of shooting "Aguirre," he threatened to walk off the set. Herzog seriously threatened Kinski's life, saying that if he took off, he'd get his rifle and put "eight bullets in his head ... the ninth one would be mine."

For some reason, Kinski returned to the set, and, for the rest of the shoot, behaved professionally. I believe that he understood the desperate point to which he had driven Herzog, and it moved him to compassion: He "recognized" this extreme distress.

It is remarkable, given the absurdly incendiary relationship of these two men, that one of them didn't end up floating facedown in the Urubamba river.

The only woman for whom Kinski ever seems to have developed a profound attachment was Minhoï, a moody Vietnamese orphan he married in 1972.

"It takes Minhoï's Asian soul a long time to adjust to the dreadful extremes in my character. On the one hand, I'm irritable, I fly off the handle too easily, I react too quickly. My French is bad, but I'm impatient if Minhoï doesn't understand me right away, and these misunderstandings, behind which I suspect the most subtle schemes, poison my mind and my soul. I'm desperate. I have a low frustration tolerance, and my outbursts are unlimited. On the other hand, I'm considerate to the point of self-sacrifice, and my love is so immense that it terrifies Minhoï."

Kinski describes having been so insanely jealous that Minhoï was forced to give up all her friends -- she burned her phone book in front of him, to soothe him. At one point, he made her go to the bathroom with the door open so she would never leave his sight.

Minhoï and Klaus both became obsessed by the idea of their unborn son, and how he might transform their frayed inner lives and tumultuous relationship. Kinski, the man whom no woman or director could tame, imbued the baby with visions of whacked-out Germano-nature-culto-mystical eugenic über-powers:

"I count the hours, the days, the minutes, until the birth of my son, like a convict carving the days, the hours, the minutes, and seconds into the walls of his cell. My son will be my redeemer. His love will liberate me from the chains of torment ... Just as a fettered but growing tree smashes the iron rings that threaten to grow into its bark and flesh, as they do into my soul, my son is my strength, pushing to the outside from my innermost depths."

Suffice it to say, Kinski wasn't exactly cut out for a healthy parental narcissistic cathexis -- "The Drama of the Gifted Child" has no better poster boy than poor Nanhoï Kinski, who had the extra misfortune of being a startlingly beautiful child, which must have seemed a physical confirmation for Klaus that his unsupportable sentiments were warranted. After Minhoï inevitably left him and Kinski was unable to see Nanhoï every day, he stalked them, refusing to believe his wife had finally escaped the gravitational vortex of his love.

READ PART 2 NEXT TUESDAY!

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Artwork: “Orange Voltaire,” oil on canvas by Cintra Wilson, 2020