Christiane Kubrick interview
nessuno2001
After Stanley Kubrick
Christiane Kubrick had 42 wonderful years with her husband. But in the
decade since his death, she has been beset by tragedy. For the first
time, she talks about losing one daughter to cancer, another to
Scientology – and why her uncle made films for Goebbels
Jon Ronson
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 August 2010 21.31 BST
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 21.31 BST on Wednesday
18 August 2010. A version appeared on p19 of the G2 section of the
Guardian on Thursday 19 August 2010. It was last modified at 22.56 BST
on Wednesday 18 August 2010.
Close-knit … Stanley and Christiane Kubrick Photograph: Tom Cunningham/
NY Daily News /Getty
It's Thursday evening and the tiny figure of Christiane Kubrick takes
to the stage at Somerset House on the Strand in London, to introduce
an open-air screening of her late husband's film Paths of Glory. She
reads from a prepared script: "Important events in life feel like they
happened yesterday. But it was 53 years ago that Stanley saw me on
German television and hired me . . ."
Stanley Kubrick gave Christiane the part of a bar singer. They married
and barely left one another's side for the next 42 years. They raised
three children: Anya and Vivian, plus Katharina, her daughter from an
earlier marriage. Now, when she isn't running her art school from
their Hertfordshire manor house, Childwickbury, Christiane is a kind
of travelling protector of Stanley's legacy, trying to imagine how he
might have wanted things done.
She continues reading: "I thought Stanley was extraordinary, and by
some miracle he thought the same thing of me. As a result, my life has
been a very happy one, very wonderful in every respect." Which is no
longer quite so true. After four decades inside Childwickbury – where
the Kubricks created a kind of blissful, busy mix of film production
and family life – she has fallen victim to a series of tragedies. The
one involving her daughter Vivian has been a family secret, but now,
on the night of the Paths of Glory screening, she says she wants to
talk about it.
I've known Christiane for eight years, on and off. I dealt with her
while making my documentary, Stanley Kubrick's Boxes, which involved
me looking through the 1,000 boxes he left behind. She was always
welcoming and charming, even though, as she said, she was struggling
with the "abyss" his death in 1999 created. One time, she and Anya
spotted me riffling through one of his old notepads in the stable
block. She said: "I get very upset at seeing some of his old things.
The paper is so dusty and old and yellow. They look so sad. The person
is so very dead."
There were some things I always felt nervous asking her about, like
anything to do with her uncle Veit Harlan, but tonight over dinner –
Paths of Glory making her nostalgic for the early days, I think – she
brings the subject up herself. "Stanley and I came from such
different, such grotesquely opposite backgrounds," she says. "I think
it gave us an extra something. I had an appalling, catastrophic
background for someone like Stanley." She pauses. "For me, my uncle
was great fun. He and my father planned to join the circus. They were
acrobats. They threw me around. It was a complete clown's world.
Nobody can imagine that you can know someone who was so guilty so
intimately – and yet not know."
It turned out that when Harlan wasn't clowning around with Christiane,
he was writing and directing propaganda films for Goebbels. The most
notorious was a film called Jud Süss, in which venal, immoral Jews
take over and ruin a German city, stealing riches, defiling Aryan
women, etc. The film was shown to SS units before they were sent out
to attack Jews. Harlan was tried twice for war crimes, and exonerated,
proving that Goebbels had interfered with Jud Süss, forcing him to re-
edit and inject more antisemitism.
"Where my uncle was an enormous fool, as many talented people are, was
that he mistook his gift for intelligence," says Christiane. "He was a
great big famous film person. He looked better and talked better and
had enormous charm. So he thought he was also far more intelligent
than Mr Goebbels. Goebbels was 10,000 times smarter than my uncle."
She pauses. "Film people, actors, are puppets. We are silly. We are
silly folk."
Christiane says her uncle's story reinforced for Stanley and her their
great principle in life: always be suspicious of people who have, or
crave, power. "All Stanley's life he said, 'Never, ever go near power.
Don't become friends with anyone who has real power. It's dangerous.'
We both were very nervous on journeys when you have to show your
passport. He did not like that moment. We always had to go through
separate entrances, he with [our] two American daughters upstairs, and
me with my German daughter downstairs. The foreigners downstairs! He'd
be looking for us nervously. Would he ever get us back?"
Christiane laughs; of course they were always reunited. They spent a
lifetime together inside Childwickbury, where Stanley created his self-
governing mini-studio and the children went to progressive schools
that eschewed hierarchies. And, in fact, her German daughter Katharina
remains at Childwickbury to this day, painting and making jewellery
and helping her mother run her art school. But the two daughters by
Stanley are gone. I had no idea when I met Anya, their middle
daughter, in 2007 that she was sick. "It was one of her great gifts to
her son she never, as much as possible, allowed him to feel any of her
horrible illness," Christiane says. "She died over 10 years. With all
the things you have when you have cancer. The hair loss. The lot. She
had a terrible time."
When I met her, would she have been in pain? "Yes," says Christiane.
"She had Hodgkin's disease. She had a great deal of pain. She was very
much like Stanley in many respects. She looked like him and had many
of his characteristics. She was intelligent and a nice person." Anya
died in July 2009, aged 50.
I never met their youngest daughter, Vivian. There was mention of her
being in Los Angeles, but I sensed I shouldn't ask about it because
something had happened. Vivian had once been a big presence in the
family. When she was 17, she directed a brilliant documentary, The
Making of The Shining. When she was 24, she composed the score for
Full Metal Jacket. She shot 18 hours of behind-the-scenes footage for
that film too, but it was never edited. You catch glimpses of her in
the rushes I once got to watch: beautiful, effervescent, headstrong.
At one point, Stanley turns her camera on to her and she tells him if
he doesn't turn it off she'll take her top off to embarrass everyone.
He quickly turns it off.
"She is a fabulous person," says Christiane. "Beautiful, very witty,
enormously talented in all sorts of directions, very musical, a great
mimic, she could play instruments easily, she could sing, she could
dance, she could act, there wasn't anything she couldn't do. We had
fights. But she was hugely loved. And now I've lost her." She pauses.
"You know that? I used to keep all this a secret as I was hoping it
would go away. But now I've lost hope. So. She's gone."
It all began, she says, while Stanley was editing Eyes Wide Shut,
which starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Stanley asked Vivian to
compose the score, but at the last moment she said she wouldn't.
Instead, she disappeared into San Francisco and Los Angeles. "They had
a huge fight. He was very unhappy. He wrote her a 40-page letter
trying to win her back. He begged her endlessly to come home from
California. I'm glad he didn't live to see what happened."
On the day of Stanley's funeral, Christiane says, Vivian arrived with
a woman nobody recognised. "She just sat in Vivian's room. Never said
hello to us. Just sat. We were all spooked. Who was this person? Turns
out she was a Scientology something-or-other, don't know what."
"Did Vivian give a reason why she joined the Scientologists?" I ask.
"It's her new religion," Christiane shrugs. "It had absolutely nothing
to do with Tom Cruise by the way. Absolutely not."
"Maybe it was her way of dealing with her father's death?"
"I think she must have been very upset," Christiane says, "but, again,
I wouldn't know. I know nothing. That is the truth. I can't reach her
at all. I've had two conversations with her since Stanley died. The
last one was eight years ago. She became a Scientologist and didn't
want to talk to us any more and didn't see her dying sister, didn't
come to her funeral. And these were children that had been joined at
the hip."
I tell her that she seems to have handled all her tragedies with
remarkable resilience. "I dare say I have, yes," she says. "But I've
also been very sad. I was helped by my children. Anya, in particular."
She says that when Stanley was alive, he kept her and their daughters
cosseted from stress, from life's legal and financial arrangements,
allowing them to float through Childwickbury without worries. But he
died long before anyone expected he would, and Christiane has been
left with burdens she never anticipated. So she's forever finding
herself second-guessing him. Would he have handled the Vivian
situation differently? Would he have approved of the way she speaks
about him in interviews?
"I am very self-conscious and surrounded by his ghost when I do these
things," she says, waving her hand towards the Somerset House stage.
In the last year or two, there's been a Royal Festival Hall screening
of 2001: A Space Odyssey, complete with live orchestra, a Kubrick
season at the Barbican, a mammoth Taschen book Stanley Kubrick's
Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made, and more. "Would he like
that?" she says. "I'm always having these conversations with him as I
am not terribly secure. And I try to live like I think he would want
me to go on, because of the grandchildren and everything. I'm also, by
nature, quite gregarious."
At the end of our dinner I tell her, with some embarrassment, that I
find her quite inspiring. She thinks about this for a moment. "I'm
very pleased that Stanley liked me," she replies.
When I get home I mention to a friend, a Kubrick buff, that I'd just
had dinner with her. "Oddly, I was just thinking about her today," he
replies. "A Twilight fan said to me, 'Is there anything more romantic
than Edward and Bella?' I immediately thought, 'Christiane Kubrick's
protection of her husband's legacy.'"
kelpzoidzl
Amazing gut-wrenching article.
Vivian. Call home for crying out loud.
MP
Thanks for the article. Very sad news; didn't know Anya died last
year. Some believe Vivian was introduced to Scientology via Kristie
Alley; they worked on The Mao Game in 1999.
s_o_keefe
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/aug/18/stanley-kubrick-christiane
>
> After Stanley Kubrick
>
Thank you for spotting and bringing this interview with Christiane to
the group; which reads like a much-needed catharsis. Katharina
informed me, back in 2001, that Anya was going through very difficult
chemotherapy -- it's very sobering to learn the misery of cancer was
endured so long.
Regards,
Steve
MickeyMoop
She lives in hearts; father and daughter united through summers and
springs in the blessed gardens of Elysium, shalom.
iam...@hotmail.com
contact her family one day.
Best,
Steve
Neryssa
wrote:
What did she not get about her sister dying? If that did not wake her
up, nothing will.
Neryssa
the EWS premiere:
s_o_keefe
> An article in French with a portrait of the three Kubrick daughters at
> the EWS premiere:
For those who may skip over the French text, the article also links a
recent interview with Katharina:
FYI, Vivian's Scientology connection was first discussed on AMK in
2001:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.movies.kubrick/msg/e4a56d9d3f6fef2a
Regards,
Steve
kelpzoidzl
If it is true that scientology really teaches "disconnecting" from
family---then it is way off base and lacks compassion if it is done as
a cultish behavior. Unless a family is a bunch of serial killers or
something......serious, seems to me a good philosophy or religion
would want to be close to family. But I would have to have proof, that
scientology is the real reason, rather then some personal issues.
Vivian is on a couple 2008 Q and A videos with Malcolm etc, and she
seems quite normal and happy---why she would cut herself off from
family? Who knows? If it is really due to scientology I would never
support that kind of thing. I think AA has members cut themselves
off. Some mental health practitioners, do it too. Generally I find it
appalling and cowardly when cults or anyone does it.
MP
Thanks for those links o_keefe.
I think most New Age Cults are quite militant in the way they seperate
the cult member from family members and "past connections". Most cult
members also appear and act normal. Cults don't eradicate original
personalities, they just create a new one alongside the old one. A bit
like Full Metal Jacket's indoctrination process.