Reconstructing "Greed."

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: DECEMBER 02, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 120201np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: "Greed": Reconstructing a Lost 1924 Masterpiece
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The 1924 silent film classic "Greed," directed by Eric von Stroheim, has topped the American Film Institute's list of the 10 most-wanted lost films. The film was lost in the sense that the studio cut it down to 135 minutes from the director's intended four and a half hour length.

My guest, Rick Schmidlin, has reconstructed the film. It will premier Sunday night on Turner Classic Movies. Schmidlin's restoration of Orson Welles' film "Touch of Evil" was released last year.

The movie "Greed" is adapted from Frank Norris's novel "McTeague." McTeague is a strong but not very bright or worldly man from California mine country who starts a dental practice without a license. He falls in love with one of his patients, who happens to be his best friend's fiancee.

The friend, Marcus, steps aside but later seeks revenge. Just before McTeague marries, his intended wins a $5,000 lottery, which she insists on saving, not spending, even after he loses his practice and they descend into poverty. McTeague ends up killing his wife and confronting his former best friend and rival in a fight to the death in the scorching heat of Death Valley.

I asked Rick Schmidlin about the cinematic breakthroughs in "Greed."

RICK SCHMIDLIN, PRODUCER: "Greed" basically was a major breakthrough as far as location direction. Von Stroheim shot it almost as a documentary, where he shot on existing sets in existing buildings on existing streets, even to the point where he brought the final climax to Death Valley, which was shot under 140-degree weather conditions.

They had asked him to shoot it somewhere up in the Oxnard area in the desert, and von Stroheim wanted to go to the actual location that Frank Norris in his book "McTeague" had written about. So he brought his crew to Death Valley.

During that trip, one of the guides died, and Jean Hersholt lost 20 pounds, and...

GROSS: Who was one of the stars of the film.

SCHMIDLIN: Exactly. He became very ill, lost 20 pounds, and it was excruciating experience for everybody. But von Stroheim captured that, something that we almost consider normal now, you know, where you would go to a location. At that point, everything was basically confined around Hollywood or around New York, as far as the American cinema.

GROSS: I have to say, the lighting in that Death Valley sequence at the end of the film is pretty extraordinary. I'm wondering if any of that is hand-tinted as well.

SCHMIDLIN: The actual black and white photography is the way it appeared in Death Valley. He had William Reynolds and Ben Daniels, he had two cameras going, which he had throughout the entire shoot. So, no, he just -- it was lit the way it was naturally set there, with obviously reflectors and things of that nature, that were even -- were used during that period of time and are still used today.

But we did tint the Death Valley sequence yellow, as was specifically required in the script. So now it has a more intense hot feel to it. So now it's not stark black and white, like we'd previously seen, but it has a yellow glow to it.

GROSS: The first version of Eric von Stroheim's "Greed" was about nine hours, and the version he actually showed the studio later was over four hours. What was his ambition? Why make it so long? I mean, studios were just not releasing four-hour films.

SCHMIDLIN: Well, you have to think that "Intolerance" had been three hours, D.W. Griffith's film in 1916. And von Stroheim's intention was to do the master one better. Also, at that time, you would show a cartoon, a comic short, maybe a B feature, and the feature film. So you would go out for an evening's entertainment.

Von Stroheim felt that audiences were ready for one good, solid evening of solid programming, rather than a bunch of little fillers and things like that, that there was an audience that wanted just intelligent viewing and would want not -- and people think he wrote and took things right from the book. He expanded upon the book, rather than deleting upon the book, which is what would be the common practice in filmmaking.

And he just felt that this would intrigue audiences. His idea was that you would go in and see the first half of the film, go out and maybe have a dinner for an hour, and come back and see the second half of the film.

GROSS: What did the studio do when it got this four-hour film?

SCHMIDLIN: The studio basically rejected von Stroheim's four-hour version. So what happened is, von Stroheim sent it to his friend Rex Ingram in New York, whose editor, Grant Weitoch (ph), reduced it to three and a half hours. Rex Ingram was the famed director of "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." He was basically known for his Rudolph Valentino films.

They screened the film in New York, and one of the business people for the MGM at the time watched and said, Gee, the first half plays beautifully, but if people come and see the second half first, they will never come back to see the first half. And on that alone, the film was reduced to a little over two hours.

GROSS: So what's left of the remaining hours of film that were edited out of the final cut?

SCHMIDLIN: The film was melted down for its silver content. As soon as they re...

GROSS: Its silver content?

SCHMIDLIN: Well, there's silver in the emulsion of the nitrate film. And I think it was worth at that time 5 cents an ounce. And that was what you do with your extra footage after you were done with it, that the studios would melt it down and sell it for its -- the content of silver that was in the nitrate.

So "Greed" was destroyed, supposedly, immediately after the edit was done, and that's why there was no footage that existed, and why it was considered the great lost film.

GROSS: What did you find that enabled you to restore the film?

SCHMIDLIN: It was during the time that I had just come back from northern California, where I had worked with Walter Merch (ph) on "Touch of Evil." And Universal Studios asked me if I could find some publicity photographs that they could use for the "Touch of Evil" campaign.

I went to the Margaret Herrick (ph) Library, and while in Washington waiting for the photographs, I decided to do just a little research on my own. I basically had just finished reading a 280-page version of the screenplay of "Greed," which a friend of mine, Ran Manzerik (ph), who was the keyboardist to The Doors, had given me for Christmas earlier that year.

And I just wrote down on a little card, "Give me what you have on `Greed.'" And they brought out two boxes, two very large boxes. One contained a continuity screenplay dated March 31, 1923, that was 50 pages longer than the screenplay I had read. And the other box contained 633 stills, more than 230 stills than were previously known to exist.

And I wound up spending the next three days there going through the script, going through the stills, and realizing that this entire story could be told.

GROSS: So what you did was take the original script with this 50 extra pages, and tell parts of the deleted story through the film stills, the photographic stills that you found.

SCHMIDLIN: Exactly. The stills were able to tell a linear story. Every single scene that was exorcised from the film was captured in the stills, plus there were 633 titles that were originally intended for the film, and I was able to use 600 of those titles, taking out the titles that previously had been put in by MGM and putting in the titles that von Stroheim originally intended, which kept the narrative very strong.

GROSS: My guest is Rick Schmidlin, and he's just restored the 1924 silent film classic "Greed" by Eric von Stroheim. And it will be premiering Sunday night on Turner Classic Movies.

Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is Rick Schmidlin. And he just produced a restoration of Eric von Stroheim's classic 1924 silent film "Greed."

What was the impact of "Greed" on von Stroheim's career?

SCHMIDLIN: Devastating. I don't think he ever fully recovered. He did go on to make films such as "The Merry Widow," "Wedding March." "Queen Kelly" was never fully realized. That was the one that he'd done with Gloria Swanson that was being produced by Joe Kennedy.

And he just fully never recovered from "Greed." I mean, if you can imagine creating a true masterpiece and having it totally destroyed by others, he was never the same after that.

GROSS: Never the same because the film was taken away from him and the studios lost faith in him?

SCHMIDLIN: He -- that his one really golden moment, his one moment of truth, was lost. It -- you know, I mean, it was like writing the one fantastic novel, painting that one perfect picture, and just having it not only reviewed horribly but destroyed.

GROSS: Did people go see it?

SCHMIDLIN: "Greed" was not a success at the time. Half the people who reviewed it said it was the greatest piece of cinema yet. The other half thought it was the ugliest, most disgusting, putrid film ever made. It was forgotten about. It was years later in the '30s when people like Weinberg and people like Eisen -- Sergei Eisenstein from Russia and Jean Renoir from France started discussing "Greed" and saying that it was the great lost masterpiece of the silent cinema.

They were all followers of von Stroheim, and they kept the legend alive for the years to follow.

GROSS: Von Stroheim is a fascinating movie figure. He emigrated to the United States from Austria, started his film career working with D.W. Griffith. What did he do for Griffith?

SCHMIDLIN: As he once said, he started sweeping the floors and was then promoted as an assistant to Mr. Griffith. He worked on "Birth of a Nation." He worked as an assistant on "Intolerance," Griffith's great masterpiece, other great masterpiece. And then he went to work for John Emerson, where he went to New York and worked on films with Fairbanks and worked his self up into the ranks, as an actor and as a technical adviser of military expertise, to the point where he finally convinced Carl Lemly (ph) to let him direct a film.

GROSS: Now, when he first read the novel "McTeague," the novel by Frank Norris that "Greed" is based on, he was living in a house in a room on Skid Row in New York. What was he doing there? What point of his life was he in?

SCHMIDLIN: Von Stroheim says that he was that night in a room on Skid Row, and his job was to make sure the prostitutes got safely into their rooms. And as he had this horrible job, he found in the room a copy of "McTeague" by Frank Norris. And that night he did a horrible job watching the prostitutes and did a wonderful job reading the book.

GROSS: What was he doing on Skid Row? Was this before he started his movie career?

SCHMIDLIN: He -- well, von Stroheim came to America around 1909, and at that point is when he added the "von." He was just Eric Stroheim at that time. And he worked around in various jobs, as an Austrian immigrant.

GROSS: So is -- the "von" is something that he just added to his name?

SCHMIDLIN: He added nobility to his name.

GROSS: Did he lie about coming from nobility?

SCHMIDLIN: Yes. He came from a father who was a Jewish hat maker in the not-so-fine part of Vienna. His mother came from Prague. And though his background is kind of sketchy, I was able to find recently six family portraits of his family that came from that period of time that still have not been published and not been seen by anybody. And it kind of shows that, yes, his father has hole -- in the portraits, his father has holes in his shoes, and, you know, he was not the count that von Stroheim had told Thomas Curtis about. He was -- and Peter Noble. He was -- definitely came from a more humbler background.

GROSS: He was nicknamed by some "the man you love to hate." I think that was because he played German officers in World War One films. I guess the most famous portrayal like that is in "Grand Illusion," the 1937 French film. Was he in many roles like that, where he played a German officer?

SCHMIDLIN: Well, "Grand Illusion" was done much earlier. He played roles all through the teens, 1916, 1917, during the war. He was in D.W. Griffith's "Hearts of the World." In one Universal film, he throws a baby out the window, and then rapes the mother. He played the worst of the Nazis.

Von Stroheim was an Austrian Jew that hated the German regime, and his way of combating the -- what was going on in Europe, both during the First World War and the Second World War, was by portraying these German soldiers this way.

I just found recently an award that no one -- his son didn't even know he had, that he was awarded a special award from the French Resistance in 1944 for his work in helping them in France during the war and being supportive of them.

GROSS: I think one of the roles he's most famous for in America is his role in "Sunset Boulevard," in which he plays the Butler to the washed-up silent film star played by Gloria Swanson.

SCHMIDLIN: Yes, two short stories on that. First, I was fortunate enough about a week and a half ago to be able to visit Billy Wilder, and while I was able to show him selected scenes, and he's now since watched the entire production of "Greed." And he told me that von Stroheim would -- you know, was one of his great heroes, and he was just so glad that he was able to put him in "Sunset Boulevard," and that the idea of the fan mail coming from the butler was von Stroheim's idea.

But I had dinner the other night with the von Stroheim family, his son and the widow of Eric von Stroheim, Jr., his grandson, Eric von Stroheim I. And Mary Alice von Stroheim, the widow of Eric von Stroheim, Jr., said he made one comment about "Sunset Boulevard" that I thought was hilarious. He said, "It's bad enough that they're making me play a butler in the film. That's degrading enough. But I have to play a sloppy butler!"

GROSS: (laughs)

SCHMIDLIN: He goes, "That's the worst!" And that...

GROSS: Well, he was a pretty meticulous filmmaker, wasn't he? Really attention to detail.

SCHMIDLIN: Oh, he was. He cared about detail, detail that you would not think that you'd see, but actually we did sense in the films.

GROSS: Give me a good example of that from "Greed."

SCHMIDLIN: The detail in "Greed," the dental office is a dental office, and it is in a room that he actually made McTeague live in, so that he had a sense of that. The food that they were eating at the time was the food that this Swiss-German family would have eaten at the time. The conditions in Zarkau (ph), which he did build that set, are, you know, the conditions that Zarkau would have been in.

But the greatest thing is, again, Death Valley, bringing a crew to 140-degree temperature and staying out there for those weeks. Everything had to be real, because he felt that the audience would feel if it was imitated, if it was on the screen.

GROSS: What do you know about how von Stroheim and his film crew and the actors survived Death Valley? How did they do it? I -- did they trek in and out every day? Were they just on the edge of it?

SCHMIDLIN: They camped it. No, they camped. They stayed there. And they hated him for it. They -- Jean -- finally, at the end of the scene, there's a fight between Jean Hersholt and Gibson Gowland, McTeague and Marcus. And von Stroheim said, "If you want to get out of this scene, I want you to really fight each other and really make it brutal." And if you watch that fight, you see a sense of realism in 140-degree temperature that you have not seen in any other film.

GROSS: Then you think that's because they were so desperate to get out (inaudible)?

SCHMIDLIN: They were desperate. Yes, after three weeks, and you're in Death Valley, and someone says, "The only way you... " and it's 140 degrees -- "if you beat up the next guy, whoever makes it the most realistic and makes the scene work,you're going to be out of there," you're going to do whatever you can to make that scene the best scene and the most realistic fight you've ever seen. And they were both so filled with hatred of what von Stroheim was doing, they just went at each other.

GROSS: Now, I know that you found some of the original title cards that were taken out by the studio in the studio cut of "Greed," the shortened cut of "Greed." I want to read you one of the title cards, and tell me if this is one of the ones that was taken out by the studio. And this is after the Trina character, the character played by ZaSu Pitts, when her marriage is falling apart, and her husband's, you know, been hitting her, and the card says, "This brutality, in some strange, inexplicable way, aroused in Trina a morbid, unwholesome love of submission."

SCHMIDLIN: Yes, that was what he intended to put into the film.

GROSS: Was that something that was taken out by the studio?

SCHMIDLIN: That was taken out by the studio, yes.

GROSS: Too unwholesome? Too unwholesome a thought?

SCHMIDLIN: I -- it was not a wholesome thought, it was a thought that he wanted this character to have, and he was very serious about developing this character in a very meticulous way.

GROSS: Are there any changes that you've made in "Greed" that you think people who have seen the cut version that circulated for so many years will be very surprised by, because it's not what they remember from the original?

SCHMIDLIN: Yes. One of the most famous lines from the film, "Let's go sit by the sewer," had to be removed.

GROSS: Why?

SCHMIDLIN: It was not what von Stroheim intended. The scene is when von Stro -- when Gibson Gowland and ZaSu Pitts are to go for a walk, and they're going to go for a walk -- that is go -- they're -- and they're -- during the walk, they're going to go and sit on the sewer and pass a dead rat.

And basically what was supposed to be intended to be said was, "Let's go and have a nice walk." And then you would see this imagery. But somebody at the studio decided it would be nice to say, "Let's go and sit by the sewer," and get a bad laugh out of it. And they put that in.

And it's probably the most controversial edit I made in the film, because there are those purists that really did love that line. They miss "Let's go sit by the sewer." And I would say that would be the biggest comment I've heard from anybody, why did I take that line out of the film? And it was because it did not -- it was not in the intended story of von Stroheim.

GROSS: OK. Well, Rick Schmidlin, thank you very much for talking with us.

SCHMIDLIN: OK.

GROSS: Rick Schmidlin's reconstruction of Eric von Stroheim's "Greed" will premier Sunday night on Turner Classic Movies.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Rick Schmidlin
High: Producer Rick Schmidlin has reconstructed the masterpiece 1924 silent film "Greed" by director Erich von Stroheim, which the American Film Institute deemed number one on its list of the Ten Most Wanted Lost Films. Von Stroheim's first cut of the film was over nine hours long, but the studio insisted on a shorter cut and the final edit was two hours. Schmidlin found over 600 film stills of the original footage, which was inserted into the newly reconstructed film to complete the narrative von Stroheim wanted. "Greed" premieres on the Turner Classic Movies network on December 5th.
Spec: Entertainment; Movie Industry; "Greed"

Please note, this is not the final feed of record

Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: "Greed": Reconstructing a Lost 1924 Masterpiece

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: DECEMBER 02, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 120202NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: "The Master of Disguise": An Interview with the CIA's Former Disguise Chief
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:30

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

When a CIA spy needed to slip in or out of a country unnoticed, they often required the help of Antonio Mendez. As the CIA's master of disguise, Mendez helped create new identities, new faces, and new papers for spies. He retired in 1990 after 25 years with the CIA.

In 1997, as part of the agency's 50th anniversary celebration, he received a CIA Trailblazer award, recognizing him as one of 50 officers who helped shape the agency's first 50 years.

Now he's written a memoir called "The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life With the CIA."

Let's start with an example of his work during the cold war. In 1972, he was in Laos, in Southeast Asia. He had to arrange a way for an African-American CIA case officer to meet with and get information from a government official without them being recognized.

ANTONIO MENDEZ, "THE MASTER OF DISGUISE": This black officer was obviously well known in town, suspected to be CIA, and rather obvious in a small fishbowl kind of situation. The Asian cabinet-level fellow was a national figure. So that was sort of the essence of an espionage problem, that is, to meet securely and not draw attention.

So this black officer said, "I got a problem, because the curfew has been put in force, and there are several roadblocks being thrown up without notice. And I really have a problem meeting this guy on the day of the cabinet meeting and debriefing him."

Typically what they would do is executive car pickup, in other words, on a back street after dark, the case (inaudible) would pause briefly and the asset, as we would call him, would jump into the car. But in fact, if they ran into a roadblock, they would be up against it.

So I planned to go to the meeting that they had scheduled that night and figure out how to work this problem. And then the next day I wrote a long dispatch back to headquarters, saying, "This is the way I would approach it. Why don't you call that fellow in Hollywood that you recently contacted and see if he has any ideas?"

Well, he did. He went out to his shed in the back yard and measured some moles (ph) and came up with two stunt double disguises and sent them off. I had them like (ph) faces of Victor Mature and Rex Harrison.

GROSS: So the masks looked like Victor Mature and Rex Harrison. Were the people at the checkpoints not hip to who Victor Mature and Rex Harrison were?

MENDEZ: Well, in fact, once we dressed them up, they didn't look like -- exactly like those two fellows. But it was (inaudible) to think that in fact we were borrowing the features of two well-known motion picture stars, and anyway, the rest of the package was the Chevrolet sedan with the Corps Diplomatique plates on it, the appropriate credentials, the fact that we had now two Caucasians in a car that was all -- plainly marked as an American official car, was really the cover. The -- that was the window dressing, if you will.

GROSS: Now, when you give somebody a disguise, do you have to teach them how to behave like somebody else, in addition to how to look like somebody else?

MENDEZ: Yes. Most people think that the facial oval (ph) is where the disguise takes place. But in fact, what you're doing is managing a stage. You're dressing the stage. It's like writing a screenplay or a play. So you may set up the deception six months ahead of time, and the actual use of the disguise is just incidental to all the things that have gone before. You give those who are trying to keep track of you handles that they can latch onto, like the color of your coat or the size of your dog or the -- you know, your spouse, your car, all those things are part of the disguise.

And, of course, your mannerisms, the way you act when you come out the door every morning would be a signal that's you. It's just a nonverbal -- like, a habit of looking right and left before you step down from the door.

GROSS: I want you to tell the story of the six American diplomats who were in Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis and had to get out of Iran. They were, I think, taking refuge in the Canadian embassy, and it was your job to get them disguises so that they could sneak out of Iran and return safely to the United States.

You came up with a really elaborate -- very interesting and surprising cover story. What was the cover story you came up with?

MENDEZ: Again, the Hollywood connection. When you have a situation like that, which we call an exfiltration, you're always worrying about the legend, the reason for somebody to be there that would be innocuous. But in this case, six people who were nonoperatives, you know, they were just innocent Americans who got caught in Tehran at the time of the -- that the embassy was overrun. We couldn't come up with a plausible reason for six plus two, which would be me and my partner, to be ostensibly in country at that point.

GROSS: You couldn't very well say they were diplomats, because then they wouldn't have let them out.

MENDEZ: Right. They -- we couldn't say they were Americans even, although there were some consideration for that, there was one story that was offered up to call them six out-of-work American school teachers, which seemed rather thin. But I -- usually when you come up with a cover, a legend, for an operative, you come up with something very boring and sort of nondescript. And the -- you know, the professional can sort of flesh it out as he goes along.

But in this case, everybody was worried how these people would fare. And so I came up with something really outrageous, because, you know, one would expect that these people would be anything else but what we decided, and that was to make them into a preproduction location scouting party from Hollywood, looking for a place to shoot about 10 days of their movie.

GROSS: And so in order to make this cover work, you had to come up with a lot of things, a film script, a logo for the film company, you even took out ads in the trade magazines, like "Variety," announcing that you were about to begin shooting this movie.

MENDEZ: Good example of a deception being set up ahead of time. But we also occupied offices on the old Columbia Studio lot in Hollywood. In fact, Michael Douglas had just vacated those rooms, having just finished "China Syndrome." And were lucky to be able to call in some favors. Actually my makeup consultant was able to call in favors and get those rooms, and we were able to set up this production company over the weekend.

GROSS: Now, did the people at Columbia know -- this was on the Columbia lot, right?

MENDEZ: Yes, in the old one.

GROSS: Did they know what you were up to, or did they think that you were really filming this movie?

MENDEZ: Well, everybody thought we were filming this movie. In fact, people were coming out of the woodwork trying to get jobs...

GROSS: Trying to get parts?

MENDEZ: ... and bringing us scripts. We had some really interesting projects offered by the time that we got done with the operation. We could have kept going.

GROSS: So what were the disguises that you smuggled into Iran? And the diplomats, the American diplomats, who you had to take out of the country were taking refuge at the Canadian embassy. So how did you get yourself and the disguises into the Canadian embassy without being noticed?

MENDEZ: This wasn't really an elaborate disguise problem, this was a matter of restyling people that were not subject to hostile pursuit. But we made this a high priority during that particular period, because we realized at least one member of the media of not -- if not three had figured out where they were. And so it was a matter of time before the Canadian embassy was overrun.

So the idea was that we had to get in before hostile pursuit, in which case they were not being sought. So it was a matter of creating this grand stage in which they could, you know, just be restyled and play their parts.

GROSS: So they could look like Hollywood people and not diplomats.

MENDEZ: Yes, in other words, we just changed their hair style and some of their habits and (inaudible)...

GROSS: Made them look a little more L.A.?

MENDEZ: A little more L.A., yes.

GROSS: So what did you do, exactly? Give us an example.

MENDEZ: Well, one of the things that I had along with me was a portfolio, for which I could have -- with which I could have sold the Ministry of National Guidance at Iran the whole idea of the movie, because it was so full of window dressing and good ideas about the movie, you know, as well as the dossier on each one of these people, which was a very clever way of disguising their legend. And so each one of them got a copy of the dossier when I got in there, and they were able to study it for a couple, three days, and sort of fall into the role.

We obviously had all not only the passports that the Canadians gave us for them, but we had all the trade cards and other kinds of pocket litters, we would call it, you know, to go along with.

GROSS: Yes, what is pocket litter?

MENDEZ: Well, if you start going through your purse or your pockets you'll find that you have coins or bus coupons or matches from the Brown Derby in Hollywood. You know, the kind of thing that would be -- sort of look rather casual, but adds, you know, to the whole picture, gives it more realism.

GROSS: My guest is Antonio Mendez, the CIA's former master of disguise. He's written a new memoir. We'll talk more after a break.

(BREAK)

GROSS: Until recently, you weren't able to tell the actual story of how you came up with the disguises and the Hollywood cover for these six American diplomats, because that was classified until, I don't know, a couple of years ago, maybe, was it?

MENDEZ: Yes, and it -- on the 50th anniversary of the CIA, they decided they wanted to celebrate for the first time in 50 years, and so they asked if they could tell this story. But until that point, for 17 years it had been everybody's version that it was the Canadian ambassador that had done all this. And, of course, he went on to form (inaudible) -- fortune and fame as a result.

GROSS: How -- how -- how do you feel when a mission of yours has to remain secret and you don't get to take any credit for it outside of the CIA?

MENDEZ: But you don't take credit in that business. In fact, what's happening now, including with my memoir, is a violation of the code of the spy, and that code is you don't celebrate your successes or explain your failures. And now we have a kind of a new corporate change in outlook, and we're trying to do a little work in image. It's called openness, and it seems to be working out.

But I was quite happy to take this story to my grave and kind of feeling that this is a really good piece of cover and security, you know. There's a kind of an inverse feeling of power, of being in the know when no one else is.

GROSS: How did you learn to not let nervousness betray you when you were on a mission? And that's a skill I imagine you also had to teach some of the people who you worked with when you were giving them their disguises.

MENDEZ: Well, I'm not sure how I learned it, but in fact it's obviously very important, demeanor is really more important, the subjective quality of the individual and their documents and their legend is more important than the literal quality of them. So you, you know, you have to be a natural actor.

And when you're faced with somebody that you're trying to help in the middle of the night, which is typical, you know, they're -- basically a defector is like a man on a ledge. They have made a very important mental decision before they come to you. It's very hard to get them to go back.

But it's also very difficult to get inside their head and make them feel that they can do something rather strange, something they've never done before, and do it in -- just in a matter of minutes or hours, and get away with it.

So the demeanor that I have to project is not only the sense of confidence on my part, but projected into them, and just tell them, have a little courage. And usually I'm there, or one of us is there with them to lead them through. And you say, Just do what I do.

And so it's all part of falling into a groove, falling into the part, and carrying through.

GROSS: You had worked as an illustrator, I think for an aviation company, before joining the CIA. What's the best training that you had for this job before you took the job?

MENDEZ: Well, I was an artist of some sort all my life, so -- and I was interested in magic and in the theatrical arts and so forth. So that -- you know, I was sort of naturally inclined to do this work. But some of the best training I had was probably as a teenager on the streets of Denver, you know, the street smarts, they're probably just as important than, you know, creative arts.

GROSS: I don't think of the CIA as being a particularly artsy kind of crowd. (laughs) Did you feel like a fish out of water at any point?

MENDEZ: Not at all. Everybody that's there is a romantic, for starters, and they have an adventuresome spirit, and every day we knew we were doing God's work, so there was no higher calling that we could think of. And the fact that we were considered to be the gang that couldn't shoot straight was just an advantage. That just gave us a little more of an edge, the fact that we were considered to be thugs, again, tended to make people look for the thugs instead of the people who were really creative. It was truly a creative kind of pursuit, and great fun.

GROSS: Were there ever times during your years with the CIA that you strongly disapproved of a mission, but either had to work on it anyways, or had to watch your colleagues work on it?

MENDEZ: Well, I mean, I never got in a situation where I felt I was doing something that was immoral, or -- certainly it was all illegal, because that's what espionage is about, is breaking the laws of another country and stealing their secrets, and doing it every week. But I never felt that it was, you know, something that we shouldn't be doing from a moral point of view.

There were times when we mounted operations that were not as good as they could be, but we kind of jokingly said, Well, you know, 90 percent of operations are really for practice. It's the 10 percent that count.

GROSS: But did you ever feel like, during Iran-Contra or at times when, you know, the CIA was, say, you know, working with a dictator in Latin America, where you felt like, This isn't really exactly what I'd like to be doing?

MENDEZ: Oh, you know, there's a lot of hindsight involved in some of that. But Iran-Contra, for instance, is an example of where the administration and the White House wasn't getting everything it wanted from the CIA, so it kind of went into business for themselves, if you will. And every time that happened, in my experience, they got in trouble, because they weren't professionals.

We were the -- and still are -- the CIA is probably one of the highest regulated, the most tightly controlled from an oversight point of view, of any. And part of that came out of the -- you know, the Watergate era and this kind of investigations and so forth. But I say, Bring on the oversight! That's great. Certainly there were ideas that the administration had that they brought to us that we sort of drug our feet on, because we'd been there before. These things don't work, kind of attitude, not that they were against the law or -- I should say U.S. law, or outside of, you know, what you consider to be good moral grounds.

But there were a lot of times when they were just stupid ideas.

GROSS: Your wife is also a former chief of disguise for the CIA. I don't think there's a lot of married couples who've both been the chief of disguise for the CIA. Did you meet at the CIA?

MENDEZ: Yes, actually we got married after I left in 1990. We were both working in various places in the CIA, but we had first met about the mid-'70s and ended up where she was my subordinate as the chief of disguise. I'd already said to her that, you know, We can't be in the same line of command here. One of us is going to have to move, and it might as well be me. And then all of a sudden Congress opened the window for 30 days and said if you've got the age, you can -- and all the other requirements, you can take everything you've contributed to your annuity out and still keep your annuity.

So that was it. That was hard to pass up, given the personal situation.

GROSS: Well, Antonio Mendez, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

MENDEZ: Well, thank you.

GROSS: Antonio Mendez has written a new memoir called "The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life With the CIA."

Coming up, a review of "Galileo's Daughter." This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Antonio J. Mendez
High: Before his retirement in 1990, Antonio J. Mendez was the CIA's chief of disguise. In his 25-year career with the agency, he participated in many missions, including helping six American diplomats escape from Tehran by masquerading as a movie producer scouting Iranian locations for a science-fiction movie, then coaching the diplomats to pose as the film crew, allowing them to leave the country. His new book is "The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA."
Spec: Espionage; CIA; "The Master of Disguise"; Entertainment

Please note, this is not the final feed of record

Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: "The Master of Disguise": An Interview with the CIA's Former Disguise Chief

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: DECEMBER 02, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 120203NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: "Galileo's Daughter": A Review
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:50

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

GROSS: Dava Sobel's best-selling book "Longitude" revealed the suspense and human drama involved in the history of the science of navigation. Her latest book, "Galileo's Daughter," reveals a hidden aspect of one of the greatest scientists of all time.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BOOK CRITIC: The famous father's eyes bored into the heavens. The daughter lived her life from age 13 on shut up within the walls of a convent, "a sepulcher of stone," as another nun once put it. This dramatic situation sounds ripe for treatment by some agitprop feminist theater company, if any of those still exist.

But if Sister Maria Celeste harbored any resentment against her father, the genius astronomer and physicist Galileo, it's been blotted out by time.

Instead, the impression of their relationship that vividly develops throughout Dava Sobel's new book, "Galileo's Daughter," is that of one of the most loving father-daughter bonds ever chronicled in history or fiction.

"Galileo's Daughter" is a strange shooting star of a book. Luminous and startling, it zips along, leaving a scattered trail of bright ideas and insights interspersed with black spaces of mystification. What Sobel has done is to translate from the Italian the 124 surviving letters that the adult Maria Celeste wrote to her father.

Sobel integrates these poignant letters into a biography of Galileo, as well as an accessible and, at times, even thrilling interpretive discussion of his cosmic discoveries. She also works in a narrative history of late 16th and early 17th century Italy, including the political intrigues of the church and the powerful Medici family, as well as the ravages of the Inquisition, the 30 Years' War, and the black plague.

In a book this comprehensive, you may well ask, where are those black spaces of mystification I mentioned a moment ago? Well, ironically enough, it's Galileo's voice that's muffled here. Oh, to be sure, Sobel quotes generously from Galileo's published writings, demonstrating his poetic as well as his scientific gifts.

For instance, justifying his life's work, Galileo wrote, "Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to read the alphabet in which it is composed, triangles, circles, and other geometric figures. Without these, it is humanly impossible to understand. Without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth."

Magnificent. But from Galileo the father, we hear nary a peep. Sobel says that when Maria Celeste died at the age of 34, Galileo's letters to her constituted the bulk of her possessions in her nun's cell. The abbess who discovered them must have destroyed or buried them. After all, for avowing the startling idea that the earth moves, that it moves around the sun and not vice versa, Galileo was declared "a vehemently suspected heretic" by the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

So in this decades-long father-daughter dialogue, only Maria Celeste's voice remains. And what a voice it is -- pious, tender, funny, and oh, so intellectually thirsty. In one letter, she reminds Galileo of his promise to lend her a telescope. In another, written in November 1623, she concludes a request for warm bed linens with this plea: "Send me your book, the one that has just been published, so that I may read it, as I am longing to see what it says."

Maria Celeste is referring to Galileo's book "The Essayer (ph)," in which he discussed comets. Ten years later, as the elderly Galileo waited to be summoned before the Inquisition, Maria Celeste's letters grew even more loving and supportive. "I partake in your torments," she declared in one note. Like Galileo, who tried to reconcile his faith with his scientific reasoning, Maria Celeste bravely tried to balance the loyalties she felt to her father and his work with her sworn loyalty to the church.

The astral voyager, Galileo, lived out his last days under house arrest, confined to small rooms in a situation that mirrored that of his daughter, the cloistered nun. Nearly 100 years after Galileo's death, when followers were exhuming his remains to remove them at last to a public memorial, Maria Celeste's coffin was discovered buried secretly beneath his.

Dava Sobel lets the image speak for itself. She's too smart and elegant a writer to needlessly point out that in her affecting book, she also has uncovered Galileo's extraordinary daughter, whose lively mind was long veiled to the world.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Galileo's Daughter" by Dava Sobel.

We learned today that jazz guitarist Charlie Bird died Tuesday of cancer at the age of 74. We'll close with his 1994 recording of "Soon."

I'm Terry Gross.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "SOON," CHARLIE BIRD)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Maureen Corrigan
High: Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love" by Dava Sobel.
Spec: Entertainment; Science; "Galileo's Daughter"

Please note, this is not the final feed of record

Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: "Galileo's Daughter": A Review
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.