Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [252]
In a rare burst of synergy, Dick managed to procure an audience for Farago with the executives of Paramount, who were bowled over when he produced the beer bottle for them to look at, and Paramount soon bought the motion-picture rights. Whatever else may be said about Farago, he was a brilliant salesman—at the time they bought the rights, Paramount had seen no more of the manuscript than Peter Mayer or I had.
As the manuscript, finally, did begin to come in, the S&S legal department raised all sorts of queries about Farago’s “proofs,” which he dismissed angrily. What, after all, did lawyers know? They were professional skeptics, trained not to be able to see the forest for the trees. Of course the documents were ambiguous and full of holes! Brave men had risked their lives to get him these documents. We were trying to expose a vast, dangerous Nazi conspiracy, well provided with funds and professional killers, with tentacles reaching to the highest levels of the Vatican, the CIA, and every South American government. Of course there would be gaps in the documents, ambiguous evidence, difficult puzzles—this was not a real-estate transaction, after all, this was living history, serious politics, the most explosive news story since World War Two. Certain assumptions had to be taken, certain risks accepted—this was not a book for the weak of heart to publish.
Since nobody wanted to be classed among the weak of heart—and since we had already invested a considerable fortune in Farago’s book—we proceeded, eventually convincing everyone, including ourselves and the S&S sales reps, that Aftermath was going to be a huge best-seller that would make front-page news. Even Hugh Collins acknowledged that in Aftermath we had the real goods—he pledged to get the book into the windows of every major bookseller in Chicago.
WELL, WE did make front-page news, well before publication—and above the fold in The New York Times at that. Unfortunately, it was with a story that the presumed Martin Bormann whom Farago had discovered and photographed was in fact a harmless Argentinean schoolteacher named Nicolas Siri. Before long, the Germans produced Martin Bormann’s skull and dental fittings, allegedly found in the rubble of Berlin, just where he had last been seen by Arthur Axmann, Baldur von Shirach’s successor as head of the Hitler Youth, during their escape from the Führerbunker in May 1945. Not to be outdone, the Russians revealed Bormann’s diary of his last weeks with Hitler, which he had left behind in the bunker. Although Farago argued that the skull was a fake perpetrated by reporters from Der Spiegel and the diary a forgery by the KGB (for what purpose it was not clear), the air was definitely out of his balloon. The distinguished English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper gave the book the coup de grâce in a long, devastatingly destructive review in The New York Review of Books that would have led anyone but Farago to hide his head in shame.
Needless to say, the idea of doing so did not occur to him—shame was not one of the emotions he was capable of feeling strongly—however, the news scuppered Aftermath. Farago’s explanation that this was a simple and unfortunate case of “mistaken identity” that in no way reflected upon the rest of the book went nowhere, but did not dismay Paramount, since whatever they had in mind as a movie had nothing much to do with the facts anyway, nor with Farago’s book, come to that.
Apparently loyal to the old Hollywood belief that there is no such thing as bad publicity, they proceeded with their plans for the movie. The signature of the contract had been delayed for months, but when it was finally ready, Max Becker, Farago’s agent, a Central European with the sad face of a beagle and a quality of weary