How British Intelligence Plotted to Read Hitler's Mind E-Book

James Parris

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 504

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

In the darkest days of the Second World War, as Europe fell under Nazi domination and Britain faced invasion, Louis de Wohl, a 36-year-old refugee from Germany, made a curious offer to British Intelligence. Based on the widely held belief that Hitler's every action was guided by his horoscope, de Wohl claimed he could reveal precisely what advice the Führer's astrologers were giving him. Rather than dismissing de Wohl out of hand as a crank, senior intelligence officers and chiefs of staff of the three armed services took him at his word. De Wohl was made an army captain and quartered in the Grosvenor House Hotel, from where his one-man 'Psychological Research Bureau' passed astrological readings and assessments to the War Office, before his deployment to the United States by the highly secret Special Operations Executive on a propaganda mission. Was it possible that Military and Naval intelligence officers could take the ancient and arcane practice of astrology seriously? Was de Wohl genuine or merely a charlatan? Did his astrological readings contribute to the downfall of Hitler and Nazi Germany? In How British Intelligence Plotted to Read Hitler's Mind, the first fulllength study of Louis de Wohl, James Parris examines the evidence – including material from MI5, Military and Naval Intelligence files at the National Archives – and reaches remarkable conclusions about this bizarre aspect of the Second World War.

Leseprobe

First published 2021 as The Astrologer: How British Intelligence Plotted to Read Hitler’s Mind

This paperback edition first published 2025

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© James Parris, 2021, 2025

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For Isabel, who had her doubts

CONTENTS

Prologue

1   An Aquarius Born

2   An Air of Baroque Opulence

3   A Perfectly Splendid Chap

4   When Hitler Knows he is Lucky …

5   Hitler Fears Death

6   America Would be ‘in’ by

7   We Must Never Lie by Accident

8   A Bumptious Seeker after Notoriety

Conclusion: Here is Gold! Enough Gold for us all!

Select Bibliography

Notes

PROLOGUE

‘There’s some ill planet reigns:

I must be patient till the heavens look

With an aspect more favourable.’1

Baron Harald Keun von Hoogerwoerd, astrologer, to Louis de Wohl, 1930:

Everybody has felt that at some period of his life he was lucky or unlucky. Well, we know when we are going to be lucky and when unlucky … One is, as it were, in the position of a general who has at his call an excellent secret service. He will be informed in time about the movement of the enemy – and of every movement of the allies too.2

Louis de Wohl, Secret Service of the Sky, 1938:

I have come to the firm conclusion that a knowledge of astrology is one of the most valuable assets of human life. The use of this knowledge is as ideal as it is practical and I have the feeling of a man who discovered a Bonanza of incalculable value and calls to his friends: ‘Come here! Here is Gold! Enough Gold for us all!’3

Memorandum, ‘Advice tendered to Herr Hitler’, 30 September 1940, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence:

It has been known for some time that Hitler attaches importance to advice tendered to him by astrologers, and that he studies the horoscopes, not only of himself, but of his own generals and of his more influential opponents … The significance of Hitler’s astrological researches is not therefore whether or not we believe in them or if they represent the truth, but that Hitler believes in them, and to a certain extent bases his acts on the opinions and predictions of his astrological experts.4

Louis de Wohl, ‘The Orchestra of Hitler’s Death’, January 1941:

His very love of life will increase his fear of death … By his astrological advisers he is told this: ‘Your death will be Neptunian. This means that it will be mysterious and strange, you will disappear, and the people will not for a long time, if ever, actually know how you have died.’5

Dick White, Assistant Director MI5 B Division, to MI5 Deputy Director General Jasper Harker, 19 February 1942:

I have never liked Louis de Wohl – he strikes me as a charlatan and an imposter. He at one time exercised some influence upon highly placed British Intelligence officers through his star gazing profession.6

MI5 officer Toby Caulfield’s observations on Louis de Wohl, 24 September 1942:

Louis de Wohl … is widely known as an astrologer and, despite the fact that many people regard him as a charlatan, there are still a great many people eager to take his astrological advice. He has great gifts as a psychologist and excellent insight into the Continental mind.7

Lieutenant Colonel Gilbert Lennox, Operations, MI5, 14 January 1943:

The only interest of astrological forecasts to Service Departments, or for that matter to anyone else, should be that it may be interesting and informative to know that the advice given in these reports may be the astrological advice that Hitler is receiving from his astrologers. The danger is that all this sort of pseudo-science is most insidious, and unless you have a complete sceptic or a very strong-minded man dealing with it, quite the wrong point of view may be indulged in.8

Ellic Howe, typographer and printer working for Political Warfare Executive, on Louis de Wohl, early 1943:

He asked me to repeat my name and how to spell Ellic. Then, without lowering his persistent gaze, he took a pencil in each hand and simultaneously wrote ‘Ellic Howe’, normally with his right hand and in mirror or reversed writing with his left one. I felt he was trying to hypnotise me and looked away. That broke the tension and we got down to business.9

1

AN AQUARIUS BORN

1

All warfare is a bloody mix of nightmare and farce, but Britain’s engagement of an astrologer in the fight against Nazi Germany raised the element of farce to a new level. When Louis de Wohl began his wartime involvement with British Intelligence in 1940, he was a practising astrologer in London with a clientele composed of – in an MI5 officer’s words – ‘the good and the great’. De Wohl had also been a prolific novelist and writer for the screen in pre-Hitler Germany. He had a network of acquaintances and friends among artists, actors, film directors and diplomats in Britain and among refugees from Nazism in the United States. He was at heart an entertainer who saw the distinction between reality and fantasy as fluid rather than rigidly clear cut. Born with the Sun in Aquarius, de Wohl once described the sign’s typical native, knowing he would thereby reveal part of himself to his reader:

He is everything at one and the same time, conventional and eccentric, conservative and onto anything new like a flash. He has a great sense of the romantic. His strongest asset is his imagination, which stops at nothing. He is gay, lovable, good-natured, but nevertheless keeping an eye open for himself … Sometimes his imagination kicks over the traces and he builds castles in the air … Everything originates in his mind and imagination. He can make plans like no other can.1

De Wohl had become an active informant for MI5, the Security Service, in 1938, three years after his arrival in England from Germany, feeding scraps to his handler about the questions his astrological clients were asking, what concerned them, the advice he was giving. Why, how and who made the initial contact has never been revealed and de Wohl avoids mentioning in books dealing with his life to the role he played informing on others.2 What evidence there is emerges patchily from the surviving personal file MI5 kept on him.

For a few of his intelligence contacts there were elements of de Wohl’s complex character that never quite rang true, the worrying impression he was playing some private and mysterious game, perhaps even a treacherous one. ‘Did Louis de Wohl believe in astrology?’ a fellow practitioner in the strange concoction of science, art and intuition once asked himself. ‘I began to doubt it: he could talk of his practice in the same superficial and often brilliant manner as of any other matter, be it women, card games, a new fashion or the shortage of cigars.’3 And yet for a time British Military and Naval Intelligence were willing to listen to what he had to say.

Ludwig von Wohl left Nazi Germany in 1935, two years after Hitler took power in Berlin as Chancellor. He became Louis de Wohl on his arrival in London. While not exactly a political refugee or a direct victim of persecution because of his Jewish antecedents, it was a wise decision to leave when he did. In England, at the age of 34, de Wohl had the contacts and self-assurance in 1937 to persuade the respected London publisher George G. Harrap & Co. to take on his autobiography. His narrative talent and facility in dropping names ranging from minor European aristocracy to Hollywood film moguls was undoubtedly an attraction, something for the popular market. In I Follow My Stars he presents a confident, carefully constructed and amusing picture of himself as a man with a record of achievement and a story to tell. The de Wohl of the book could easily pass as a character in a 1930s film – one he would script himself – sitting at the bar or a nearby table as Sidney Greenstreet (to whom he bore a resemblance, in bulk at least) and Peter Lorre (another Hungarian who fled Nazi Germany) conspire.

De Wohl claimed he had used astrology to select the luckiest date to publish I Follow My Stars, that the first edition sold out in 36 hours, and that in no time at all 1,700 readers wrote asking him to cast their horoscope.4 A cynical Australian reviewer was unimpressed, identifying a singular ego at work, describing de Wohl as a ‘devotee of the first personal pronoun’.5 Only two chapters of de Wohl’s book deal with the stars – ‘Astrology Changes my Life’ and ‘Strange Happenings’. But they are the crucial backbone, essential – though he would hardly have known at the time – to the wartime story to come. These chapters present de Wohl’s ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion. An initial scorn for the belief that the planets exert their influence on human affairs, that the basic features of our lives and characters are mapped out in the sky, is transformed into what he claims is a firmly based conviction.

In Berlin in early 1930, in the wake of the Wall Street Crash, the unsteady Weimar Republic – post-First World War Germany’s doomed attempt at democracy – had begun its final collapse as Nazis and Communists wrestled for power in the streets. Despite the crisis, de Wohl was prosperous and successful, a writer in his late twenties with a dozen novels and screenplays behind him. Arriving with his wife at what he anticipated would be a lively and stimulating party thrown by a composer friend, Dengerode, de Wohl was disappointed to discover they had walked into what seemed to be a drawing room class in astrology. The talk of ‘malignant Saturn’, ‘house-cusps’, ‘trigons’ and ‘sextiles’ first mystified, then irritated him. The tutorial was being conducted by Magnus Jensen, the writer of a widely read primer, Everybody’s Astrology, first published in 1922. With Germany in chaos, the old certainties gone, many were reaching for astrology and the occult as a comforting prop, a remedy. But de Wohl found himself in sympathy with a psychologist Jensen had criticised for sneering, ‘The planets have no more influence over your lives than the creases in your trousers.’6

When Jensen told the gathering – in de Wohl’s words a dozen or so ‘old women of both sexes, soft creamy-dreamy characters’ – that the planet Venus was, of course, ‘elevated in the sign of the Fishes’, de Wohl’s wife struggled to stifle her giggles. Taking advantage of a break for refreshments, the couple made their apologies and left the house. As they walked home through the Berlin streets they mocked Jensen’s pseudo-scientific jargon and what they both agreed were naïve believers in ‘medieval rubbish’. ‘If on that evening anyone had told me that I myself would one day study astrology, and seriously too, I should have laughed in his face,’ de Wohl wrote later. ‘At that time I genuinely put astrology believers on a par with common or garden lunatics.’7

Six months later, in November 1930, the experience of one evening transformed de Wohl’s entire outlook. True to character, de Wohl is keen in his autobiography to impress readers with the aristocratic provenance of his new faith. He writes that he met an old acquaintance, Henry, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin until 1918, now Prince Consort to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, at the annual Dutch Ball in the Hotel Esplanade on Potsdamer Platz. The prince introduced de Wohl to Baroness Theresa Keun von Hoogerwoerd, a lady in waiting to Queen Wilhelmina, and the baroness in turn presented de Wohl to her son, Baron Harald, a thick-set man a few years older than de Wohl. ‘His profession will interest you as a writer,’ she told him. ‘He is an astrologer.’8

From the outset, de Wohl made it clear to von Hoogerwoerd that he was sceptical about the whole business of astrology, which – describing his recent experience at his friend’s house – he regarded as no more than a primitive superstition, a relic of a less enlightened era. The baron agreed the subject did have an unfortunate tendency to attract ‘ignoramuses, dilettantes and quacks’, probably about as much – he added, to de Wohl’s amusement – as the medical profession. When the two men moved to the bar for drinks, the baron surprised de Wohl by saying, ‘You are, of course, an Aquarius born. So you will understand quickly.’ –‘I am of course a what?’ – ‘An Aquarius born. Is not your birthday between the twentieth of January and the twentieth of February?’9 De Wohl nodded and said his date of birth, 24 January. The baron produced a small notebook from his pocket, studied it for a few moments, and said the relative position of planets in both their horoscopes promised the two men would enjoy a useful relationship.

Von Hoogerwoerd offered de Wohl an outline character analysis based on what he could glean from his date of birth, but then admitted as he had read three of the writer’s novels he did already have in mind a picture of his personality. Perhaps, the baron said, a fairer experiment would be to work from the birth date of a friend, a person he knew nothing about. De Wohl gave that of Dengerode, the composer. Checking the tables in his notebook, the baron delivered what seemed to de Wohl an uncannily accurate description of his friend: his musical talent, his troubled relationships with women, his difficulties with money. Reluctant to be so easily persuaded, de Wohl wondered if he was being tricked by a form of mind-reading and tried setting what he thought would be a harder test. In the ballroom he asked his wife for the date of birth of an old school friend, a person he had never met and knew nothing about. Armed with the information, he returned to the baron. Von Hoogerwoerd studied the date, thought for a moment, took a page from his notebook and wrote a short description of the woman’s personality. In the ballroom once more, de Wohl passed the slip of paper to his wife to read. Amazed by the exactness of detail, she said she could hardly have described her friend better herself.

De Wohl’s classic conversion story now took the inevitable next step. His initial scepticism began to weaken and he asked von Hoogerwoerd to cast his horoscope, which the baron did, returning a few days later with a chart and an interpretation covering twenty typed pages. It would take very little to draw de Wohl in: two brief but apparently accurate character portraits, followed by a forecast from the baron that de Wohl would shortly suffer pain. This, he said, was signified in de Wohl’s horoscope by ‘Mars square ascendant’ at a particular moment. The movement of the planet Mars would place it ‘square’ – that is, at 90 degrees – to the astrological sign rising over the horizon at the time of his birth, Cancer. When a day or so later de Wohl cut his cheek shaving with a safety razor not once but twice in succession, drawing blood, he could only be impressed. But doubts remained in his mind. He described in I Follow My Stars his conversations with the baron. De Wohl complained that his image of himself was as an entirely self-made man, rising in the world through his own efforts with no help from anyone. ‘I should find it unbearable to have to think now that I owe everything I have done, not to my own energy and will-power and my own work,’ he told the baron, ‘but to some predetermined influence exerted by such and such combination of planets.’10

Von Hoogerwoerd’s response to de Wohl’s objection was that a horoscope was no more than a diagrammatic representation of the position of the planets at the moment of our birth and then of the forces exerted by their movements. ‘We are not the puppets of the planets. We are free … We are really free. But we are influenced by the tendencies of the planets.’ The major part of the course of our life, 60 per cent the baron estimated, depended on our will, our own volition. The baron went on to present arguments de Wohl himself would deploy a few years later to first impress and then to convince British Intelligence that he, armed with astrology, would have a positive role to play in waging war against Nazi Germany:

Everybody has felt that at some period of his life he was lucky or unlucky. Well, we know when we are going to be lucky and when unlucky … One is, as it were, in the position of a general who has at his call an excellent secret service. He will be informed in time about the movement of the enemy – and of every movement of the allies too.11

The conversation continued, de Wohl raising questions about religion, war, twins, death, the baron answering them at length – obviously having encountered each of them before from other sceptics. The die was cast, de Wohl had been won over. The pieces were being shifted into position for one of the most bizarre episodes in British military history – the employment of an astrologer as a weapon in the armoury of the intelligence services.

How long, de Wohl asked the baron, would it take to learn astrology? To acquire the basic principles, the rudiments, no more than six months. To become a master, a lifetime. ‘The study of this science was a permanent succession of revelations,’ de Wohl recalled. ‘I learned to see into the minds and hearts of people, to understand why they thought and acted as they did.’12 But a few years later, in 1938, he echoed von Hoogerwoerd when he warned, ‘The number of charlatans and rogues, who during the last 150 years have used astrology as a cloak for their swindles, is legion, the number of true, serious astrologers is very, very small.’13 Was the astrologer playing with his readers, not for the last time, revealing something others would come to suspect for themselves?

2

The one detailed description of de Wohl’s early life, the background to the man he became, comes in I Follow My Stars, which was published in 1937. By then an accomplished novelist and screenwriter, de Wohl’s skill lay in constructing a story, marshalling, manipulating and controlling facts and images for dramatic effect. To that extent, the work could never be taken as actual self-portrait, nor would de Wohl the entertainer have intended it to be. He was working to create a theatrical effect, a memorable performance, rather than attempting to recreate the past accurately. That will always be the question, whether it is the reader asking or British Intelligence: Can he be trusted? Is this man toying with me? A friend, Felix Jay, who first became acquainted with de Wohl in London around the time the book appeared, had no doubt about de Wohl’s unreliability. ‘I have never been convinced that the autobiographical hints in his writings are entirely trustworthy,’ Jay wrote. ‘He loved to give the impression of having been in many strange places and at many times.’14

In 1945 Lieutenant Colonel Gilbert Lennox, an MI5 officer who had been involved with de Wohl in various ways since the late 1930s, set out his understanding of de Wohl’s background in a two-page closely typed minute attached to the astrologer’s personal file. ‘It clears up one or two points about which we were hitherto somewhat doubtful,’ Lennox wrote. ‘The information was supplied by himself, but I have no reason to doubt that it is substantially correct.’15 Lennox sketched what he had pieced together about de Wohl’s family circumstances:

De Wohl states that his father was born in Hungary in the area which in 1919 became part of Czechoslovakia. He describes his father as coming from the middle class (probably lower middle class) … As a young man he joined the Hungarian cavalry and later obtained a commission. On leaving the Army, he studied for Law and became a lawyer … He was also for a time a journalist and a keen politician, but what his brand of politics were de Wohl professes not to know. Later still he became interested in mining propositions and moved to Berlin about the beginning of this century … De Wohl says he was also connected with the Hungarian ambassador, and owing to the work he did for this ambassador, he received some decoration from the Austro-Hungarian government which included the title of Mucsinyi. De Wohl senior married a German woman in Munich (de Wohl himself describes her as half German half Austrian). De Wohl senior died in about May 1914, 3 months before the outbreak of the First World War.

Lennox went on to describe how the family had been comfortably off when de Wohl’s father died but, like many, lost much of their money in the war and the inflation that followed in the early 1920s: ‘After the father’s death the family left the house they had in Berlin and went to live in Bavaria for six months. It then returned to Berlin, where it occupied a flat.’

De Wohl was born in Berlin on 24 January 1903, the 10lb he weighed at birth anticipating his ample grown-up figure. Sefton Delmer, head of the German Section of the Political Warfare Executive during the Second World War, would describe him as a ‘vast, spectacled jellyfish’. Another colleague would call him – equally unflatteringly – a ‘tall, flabby elephant of a man’.16 The family was Roman Catholic and both his father and mother had Jewish antecedents. He was to have three names in the course of his life. The first, his Hungarian identity, was Lajos Theodor Gaspar Adolf Wohl. Growing up and educated in Germany, he spoke no Hungarian and – inheriting his father’s status as a minor noble – he was known as Ludwig von Wohl. When he left Germany and settled in England in 1935, he became Louis de Wohl, the name by which he was known until his death.

De Wohl’s formal education began at the age of 6 and he claimed to have been a precocious reader. In his father’s study he found a stock of paperbacks with bright jackets, which he worked his way through enthusiastically: ‘They became my friends, and I owe them a lot – my own love of excitement and suspense, my longing for adventure and travel.’17 He moved on from these to the works of a best-selling author in pre-First World War Germany, Karl May; adventures set in the Orient, the Middle East, Latin America and the Wild West. ‘My concern with this building up of my own private world took my attention off what was happening around me.’18 The young de Wohl shared this taste for May’s books with Adolf Hitler, who was still reading them when he ruled Germany as Führer, recommending them to his generals.19 ‘My family might tell me repeatedly, as indeed they did,’ de Wohl wrote, ‘that he was a liar who had never done one thousandth of the things he claimed, who had, in fact, never left Germany in his life.’

The boy ignored them, determined he would one day emulate May’s adventures, or perhaps follow his example by writing as if the exploits he conjured up about his own life were true. Not just a reader, but a writer too. In his late 50s de Wohl would boast: ‘I started writing at the age of seven or just a little older, and what really set me off was that some of the stories did not go the way I wanted. I simply decided to change them, and change them I did.’20 He subsequently showed a tendency to take the same liberties with facts a number of times. He claimed to have written a play at the age of 8, ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, composing the incidental music, designing the scenery and taking the parts of both Mary Magdalene and the High Priest Caiaphas. A boy living in his mind, a world of imagination, fantasy and make-believe.

A dreamer and a fantasist, perhaps. But status and rank, and acknowledgement by others seemed essential to the adult de Wohl, who was insecure since the evaporation of the family’s wealth following his father’s death. It was his mother that de Wohl boasted about, rather than the father who had clambered from small town obscurity to minor nobility. His mother, de Wohl wrote, had been noble from birth, an hereditary Baroness of Dreifus. The Emperor Franz-Joseph of Austria-Hungary had been a regular shooting guest at her father’s Grueneck estate in the Alps, accompanied by the Empress Elisabeth. Baron Dreifus, a banker, first worked with the Rothschilds and then rose by marrying into the family. Other connections de Wohl claimed on his mother’s side were the poet Heinrich Heine, one-time Lord Mayor of London Sir Harry Worms, and the composer and conductor Sir Julius Benedict, little known today but a significant musical figure in mid-Victorian England. One of his wife’s aunts – married to an Italian baron and naval officer – had been the first European woman granted an audience with the last Empress of China, Tzu-hsi, before her death in 1908. ‘Look where I’m from,’ de Wohl was surely saying. ‘You must recognise how eminent my background makes me.’

His father’s death following a heart attack in 1914, when de Wohl was 11, marked the beginning of a decline in the family’s prosperity. ‘I loved and admired him tremendously,’ de Wohl would write, ‘but I think he was disappointed in me: I was too soft, too much of a bookworm.’ When de Wohl heard his father say one day he would have been better born as a girl, the boy agreed. ‘I came to the conclusion that it would actually be rather nice to have been a girl: they had much prettier clothes … they were treated politely, and no one forced them to learn riding or gymnastics.’21 Along with this regret there is the traditional passage-to-adulthood story: bullied at school, learning to box and stand up for himself, beating the bullies into fear and then friendship. De Wohl’s education continued for a further six years – first in Bavaria, then back in Berlin – through war, defeat, revolution and counter-revolution, latterly on the fringe of vicious and bloody street fighting between rebels and the forces of the state. Lack of money made a university education impossible and in 1920 he went reluctantly to an apprenticeship in finance secured through a family friend, Herbert Gutmann, principal director of the Dresdner Bank.22

De Wohl was placed with the Deutsch-Südamerikanische Bank, a subsidiary of the Dresdner. Bored with the plodding routine and – as de Wohl confessed – scarcely competent at what little was expected of him, he survived only a couple of years before his employers dismissed him. He had idled away much of the time at his desk doodling and writing short stories and sketches, becoming unpopular with his colleagues for exposing ‘their own system of stretching the minimum of work to the maximum proportion, like a rubber band’.23 An old school friend, Peter Secklmann, now came to his aid, persuading his own employer – the owner of a dressmaking business – to hire de Wohl as an illustrator in the firm’s advertising department. But de Wohl’s over-enthusiasm for one of the company models, the daughter of a dispossessed Russian count, led to another sacking when the two were discovered having fun in the factory dressing room.

De Wohl’s mother turned once more to the Dresdner director, Gutmann. Showing no hard feelings about his protégé’s lack of success or interest in work at the bank, Gutmann introduced the young man to Erich Pommer, the managing director of Ufa Films, the company at the heart of German cinema and in which Gutmann also had a financial interest. De Wohl took up a post in Ufa’s publicity department at 300 marks a month – three times what he had been paid at the bank – organising poster displays, composing advertisements and liaising with the press over releases. Enthusiastic about cinema since boyhood, de Wohl felt at first he had arrived at his destination, enjoying the casual and relaxed atmosphere of the entertainment business and the wide range of contacts he was making. But, soon feeling under-occupied and bored, he passed afternoons in his office writing stories, eventually beginning a novel about a prize-fighter. An attack of diphtheria, which kept de Wohl in bed for three weeks, gave him time to complete the book.

The novel was an immediate success and Berlin’s main evening paper bought the serial rights for 2,000 marks. As his writing proved increasingly popular, the rights to a second sold for 5,000 marks and the third for 7,000. Seeing he had a winner on his hands, de Wohl’s publisher offered a contract for more books, guaranteeing the writer 25,000 marks a year. Close to financial security at last – one pleasure of which was opening a current account at the Deutsch-Südamerikanische, whose bosses had first bored him, then sacked him – de Wohl married. His bride was Alexandra Betzold, nine years older and – de Wohl boasted in his autobiography – the daughter of Princess Iphigenie Soutzo, descendant of Romanian monarchs. He skirted around her background, but his MI5 handler Lennox subsequently persuaded de Wohl to reveal the actual story of his wife’s history. ‘He states his wife was nominally the daughter of a German Jewish businessman who was married to a “Roumanian princess”,’ Lennox recorded. ‘In fact, de Wohl states, his wife is really illegitimate, being the fruit of a liaison between the “princess” and an Aryan German.’24 Whatever her family’s exact placing in the social hierarchy, the Romanian ambassador in Berlin was a guest at the wedding, beginning a connection with the country’s diplomatic corps that would later have an important impact on de Wohl’s life.

After a carefree and expensive seven-week Mediterranean honeymoon, including Italy, Malta and North Africa, de Wohl’s life took on a pattern it would follow until he fled Germany in the 1930s – intense writing, interrupted by periods of overseas travel. In this he said he was encouraged by his wife, whom he nicknamed Putti, who saw changes of scene and experience as essential nourishment for his creative imagination. De Wohl’s depictions of his adventures in I Follow My Stars echo those of his childhood literary hero Karl May and, as with May, he leaves the impression that a good story is a more important consideration than the literal truth. De Wohl wrote prolifically, moving easily in the late 1920s and early ’30s between novels and scripts for films, sometimes adapting his own or other writers’ works, at others producing original screenplays. In 1928 alone he published three novels, three more the following year, as many as twenty before he left Germany in 1935. Not classical literature, as de Wohl admitted, but readable and popular, snapped up by newspapers for serialisation. Parallel with these were adaptations for films, including four in 1928: My Friend Harry, The Criminal of the Century, The President, and A Girl with Temperament. His own original screenplays included Crooks in Tails and The Eighteen Year Old in 1927, The Last Company and Love’s Carnival in 1930, The Oil Sharks and Invisible Opponent in 1933.

A typical post-marriage journey was to Egypt, accompanied by his old schoolmate and lifelong friend Peter Secklmann, carrying minimal luggage, sailing third class on a Japanese ship from Naples, taking the train from Port Said to Cairo. De Wohl’s description of the city is vivid but mechanical, resembling material cobbled together from travel brochures and guide books in the spirit of the revered Karl May:

Five minutes distant from an avenue which can almost compete with the Champs Élysées there are narrow little streets overflowing with natives in multicoloured robes, donkeys, camels, and mules. Even the shops themselves are overflowing with all kinds of vegetables, fruits, carpets, brassware, and their respective swarthy vendors. Seven hundred and seventy-seven different peoples and races pass along those streets.25

The two companions – de Wohl wrote – made the usual tourist visit to the Pyramids, moving on to Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, returning north to the port city of Alexandria, where they took ship to Istanbul via Jaffa and Smyrna. De Wohl introduces characters – Japanese, Indians and Malays, a ‘villainous’ Armenian, a stereotypical Jewish guide ‘with a thick white moustache and a bowler hat’, an adventuress with ‘milk-white skin, vivid red lips … lovely beyond belief’ – each of which seems to have stepped from one of his screenplays rather than real life. In a Smyrna dockside café, de Wohl and Secklmann are supposed to have disarmed a drunken sailor running amok with a pistol, but not before he fired two shots, one into the shoulder of ‘a fat Turk’, the second into a Venetian candelabra. In Istanbul de Wohl contacted an old friend and minor nobleman, Luca Orsini, the Italian ambassador to Turkey and later to Germany. De Wohl and Secklmann dined at the embassy, discussing Turkish and Italian politics with Orsini.

Once in Biskra, a town on the edge of the Sahara in the then French colony of Algeria, de Wohl claimed he had shared seven full pipes in one evening session of what he described as the best-quality hashish, the only effect being an 11-hour sleep from which he awoke refreshed but disappointed. Not even one vivid dream, he complained. In India he was thwarted in his effort to shoot a crocodile, an easy target, unmissable, because – de Wohl believed – the crocodile had hypnotised him at the very moment he was about to squeeze the trigger. But in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) he was able to despatch an 8in scorpion with a single blow of his rifle butt. On another of his journeys to India in the early 1930s and in Bombay (now Mumbai), de Wohl was told the date of his death. Two friends, a young Parsee couple, knowing de Wohl’s interest in Eastern religions and mysticism, persuaded him to visit a yogi living near what was then the city’s Victoria Station. Expecting a straggly bearded ancient with matted hair, de Wohl was surprised when he was introduced to a youthful, clean-shaven Doctor of Philosophy called Sarmananda. De Wohl was further taken aback to find him smoking a cigarette.

Dr Sarmananda offered to answer any question his visitor wished to ask. ‘I only want to know two dates – the day of my birth and the day of my death.’ De Wohl reasoned that if the yogi could correctly tell the first date, then there was every chance he would also be accurate when it came to the second date. But to avert the danger he would be a victim of mind reading, de Wohl concentrated his thoughts on the wrong birthdate, 12 May 1904. Sarmananda closed his eyes for a few moments and then spoke: 24 January 1903. ‘Do you still wish to know on what day you will die?’ De Wohl thought the matter over, unsure now whether this was something he really did wish to know. He answered, ‘Yes.’ Sarmananda closed his eyes again and remained silent for a full minute. ‘According to your calendar, the sixteenth of February 1964 – the date of your death.’ De Wohl wrote in I Follow My Stars, ‘I felt a certain wave of relief: I had a good many years ahead of me, and that spelled life and love, adventures and experiences. I was satisfied.’ But he could not help wondering how he would feel as the date Sarmananda had foretold came closer.26

3

De Wohl said in I Follow My Stars that a year or so after his first meeting with Baron von Hoogerwoerd he had absorbed the basics of astrology – largely self-taught – and was giving advice and pointers to friends and acquaintances based on their horoscopes, working his way towards a greater understanding of what he believed to be a science. He claimed in his autobiography to have persuaded a friend not to take a particular flight to Munich. The aircraft crashed and all on board died. He warned Herr Leborius, the owner of a film company to which de Wohl was hoping to sell rights to a novel, that he appeared from his horoscope to be sailing close to the wind in his financial affairs and risked entanglement with the law. The man laughed, dismissing de Wohl’s ‘science’ as not as exact as he imagined. ‘I was feeling absolutely sick,’ de Wohl wrote, ‘for I saw with horrifying clearness that this man was doomed without knowing it … He did not see the heavy clouds gathered above his head.’

Three days later German newspapers splashed the news that Leborius had been arrested for evading currency controls by moving money to London without official authorisation. At his subsequent trial he was sentenced to thirteen years with hard labour. De Wohl explained his method in I Follow My Stars, one that went beyond merely an understanding of the movement of the planets:

All this I could not tell by knowing only the date of his birth, but then I have had that appalling sensation of sudden and terrific clairvoyance many times in my life and long before I ever came across astrology. One can call it psychic, telepathic, or just uncanny, but I know to which aspect I owe it. It is not at all a pleasant gift to have, and yet I would not wish to lose it.27

De Wohl also claimed to have become closely acquainted with senior police officers in a number of cities while collecting materials for his novels – London, Paris, Marseilles, Port Said, Bombay, Calcutta, as well as Berlin. In Secret Service of the Sky, published in 1938, he claimed he had been able to use astrology to assist Inspector Giuseppe Calvi of the Naples police in a case involving the theft of two paintings from the home of a wealthy merchant, Giacomo Alberti. There were four, possibly five, suspects but Calvi had come up against a blank in his investigation. De Wohl asked Calvi to provide the birth dates of those he considered might be responsible. Casting horoscopes for not only these five, which included servants in the house, but also Alberti himself, de Wohl was able after a few days to identify the ‘victim’ as the thief. The merchant had been attempting an insurance scam. ‘It was child’s play. It is easy to see dishonest tendencies from a horoscope. Whether the man gives way to them or not, is quite another matter,’ de Wohl wrote in his description of the case. Not only did Alberti’s chart reveal a character inclined to dishonesty, but on the day of the theft transits of planets showed bad luck lying in wait for him. ‘The Sun and Jupiter were in bad aspect to the Cusp of his twelfth House (enmity, misfortune). It was no wonder that the attempt failed.’28

In the case of Leborius, the Berlin businessman, de Wohl had brought up his own gift as a clairvoyant, something going beyond the simple interpretation of a horoscope. But at other times he emphatically rejected the idea of prediction or clairvoyance, insisting astrology was a science that examined ever-shifting planetary influences on the lives of individuals, businesses and nations. A horoscope was an illustration of possible tendencies in a person’s life, not a description of determining factors. There was absolutely no fortune telling involved, he declared in Secret Service of the Sky:

An astrologer can never say: ‘At six o’clock in the afternoon on the 17th of September, you will have an accident and will be taken to hospital, where two hours later you will die!’ Such a prediction is either clairvoyance or a swindle – and in 999 cases out of 1,000, the latter! What the astrologer can say is: ‘On the 17th of September between 5 and 7 in the afternoon, you have a bad Mars aspect, which owing to the unfavourable position of Mars in your Natal Horoscope, brings with it the danger of an accident.’29

De Wohl published Secret Service of the Sky a year before the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939. Imagine, he said, astrology at the service of the state, not as a destructive weapon to be wielded in battle but as a guarantor of peace. ‘If each country had its astrological secret service, then it would be au fait with the general development of all countries.’ The result would be, he was confident, that ‘Surprise and sudden attacks are impossible, since no-one will be found unprepared and the result is an exceptionally sound balance of power …’30 Were these the seeds in de Wohl’s mind of his wartime involvement with British Intelligence?

De Wohl tempted fate in Secret Service of the Sky when he made a forecast about British politics that turned out to be spectacularly mistaken, one on the future of the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha. A National Liberal – Liberals who had allied with the Conservatives in the ruling National Government – Hore-Belisha had been a rising star and was proving an effective reforming political head of the army as war approached. ‘In any walk of life this man would rise to the top,’ de Wohl wrote after constructing and interpreting his horoscope. ‘The moon in Leo, wonderfully aspected, and Uranus in Scorpio, equally well aspected, predestine him for leadership.’ He was destined to rise, the astrologer said, to take the supreme office of state, prime minister. Dismissed by Chamberlain in January 1940 after he had fallen out with the army high command, Hore-Belisha never reached high office again.

Was the Secretary for War one of de Wohl’s clients among the ‘good and the great’ MI5 had identified and had the astrologer decided to give him a public boost? Or was the astrologer being over-generous to what he saw as a kindred spirit? One writer describes Hore-Belisha’s ‘flamboyance, his ‘chutzpah’, his love of publicity, his habitual unpunctuality, his perceived effeminacy, his ‘foreign’ air’.31 These were characteristics – flaws in their eyes – that MI5 officers and others subsequently said they found in de Wohl. But if the astrologer could be so wide of the mark in his prophecy of Hore-Belisha’s destiny, where else would he be mistaken? Had anyone in British Intelligence ever taken the elementary step of reading de Wohl’s books, if only to check his form when it came to astrological interpretation? It seemed not.

4

Secret Service of the Sky was not only a basic guide for the general reader on the construction and interpretation of horoscopes. The book also sketched the outline of de Wohl’s wider thinking on the subject of astrology, its possibilities and limitations. There was, he was anxious to show, far more involved than merely the twelve signs – Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces – readers were increasingly amusing themselves with in popular newspaper predictions. Most people going no further into the subject understood their ‘horoscope’ to be their Sun sign, the astrological sign in which the Sun was notionally found on the day they were born. Entertaining as this might be – and de Wohl’s first attraction to the subject had arisen through Baron von Hoogerwoerd’s description of his ‘Aquarius-born’ character – astrology’s practitioners believed it contained significantly greater depth and complexity.

De Wohl was hardly unique in his adoption of astrology in post-war Germany. The writer Theodore Zeldin has remarked on the stubborn survival over centuries of this form of soothsaying, its persistence ‘despite all its mistaken predictions, and even though it has been condemned repeatedly by religion, science and governments’.32 First curiosity and then faith had taken hold in the minds of many Germans as their country passed through an era of disorientation and anxiety following the country’s defeat in 1918, revolution and the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s. ‘The belief that one could glean knowledge from reading the stars or uncovering hidden forces operating in everyday life was remarkably widespread in interwar Germany,’ the historian Eric Kurlander writes:

By the mid-1920s astrology in particular had experienced an expansion in popularity, followed by a mainstreaming of astrological periodicals, institutes, and organisations. More than two dozen astrological journals and manuals alone competed for readers during a period of expanding interest in the occult. Academic institutions followed suit. In 1930 one local university offered a course given by the astrologer Heinz Artur Strauss.33

One argument followers of astrology used in its defence was the everyday acceptance of the role the Sun and Moon played in life on Earth: heat from the Sun as the pre-condition for existence and the observable effect of the Moon on the ebb and flow of the tides. The argument goes back at least as far as the second-century Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemy, reputedly the ‘father’ of Western astrology. In his astrological study Tetrabiblos, Ptolemy set out in detail what he saw as the influence of the Sun, Moon and the planets in human lives and the ways in which it was possible to make predictions of future events. Von Hoogerwoerd made a similar case when de Wohl questioned the idea that a planet could possibly be involved when he cut his cheek shaving, a weak analogy the baron’s listener was prepared to accept. ‘I wonder if it would seem absurd and ridiculous to you if you got sunstroke or prickly heat,’ the baron asked. ‘And moon madness, what about that? Everyone admits that that is the result of a star’s influence, nobody dares to doubt it.’34

Western astrology views the heavens as divided into twelve constellations, spanning Aries to Pisces. These are denoted in the horoscope as astrological signs, along with twelve houses in a chart, each of which represents an aspect of human life: the first house, for example, is the individual’s personality and look, the fourth matters connected with home and family, the seventh relationships and partnerships, the eighth birth, death and transformation, the tenth career and reputation. According to the French-born American astrologer Dane Rudhyar: ‘The birth-chart has to be understood as the archetype or seed-pattern of one’s individual being – as the symbolic “form” of one’s individuality, and therefore also of one’s identity, for the two are identical.’35

At the moment of birth, the Sun, Moon and the other planets will each stand in a specific sign and house and this will be represented diagrammatically in a person’s horoscope. For example, the Sun may be in Aries in the fifth house and this position will have its own significance for the astrologer. Each planet is said to exercise an influence on the individual character and on events: Mars, for example, governs courage and drive, Venus love and artistic undertakings. Just as important in the individual horoscope as the position of the Sun is the ascendant or rising sign. This is the astrological sign appearing over the eastern horizon at the moment of birth. A person may, for example, be said to have ‘Libra rising’, as Hitler did, or ‘Cancer rising’ as in the case of de Wohl. The ascendant represents an individual’s appearance and ways of behaving in the eyes of the world, the outward physical manifestation of personality.

Astrologers provide a basic analysis of a person’s character, habits, and areas of strength and weakness by interpreting complex inter-relationships in the horoscope. One important element they consider is the dynamic between the different planets, the angles they have to one another in the chart. Two planets in close proximity are described as being in ‘conjunction’, while planets at 180 degrees are said to be in ‘opposition’. Among other relations are ‘square’ (approximately 90 degrees apart) and ‘trine’ (roughly 120) degrees. These are known as ‘aspects’ and astrologers make assessments of individual personalities and the course of their lives from these.

When astrologers attempt to describe what may or may not happen in the future, they look to what they call ‘transits’. These are the movements of planets over time in relation to their original position at the moment of a person’s birth. As the planets transit they make and remake angles – aspects – to each other. Astrologers believe they can draw valuable conclusions from these ever-changing relationships. They claim, for example, to be able to suggest when a certain action is favoured and likely to succeed or – as in the case of de Wohl and his shaving cuts, frivolous though the example was – moments when a course of action is risky and inadvisable. De Wohl’s first instructor in astrology, Baron von Hoogerwoerd, told his pupil the accident in the bathroom had been in the air because during that period the movement of the planet Mars had placed it ‘square’ to the ascendant in his horoscope at birth. De Wohl gave his own broad description of astrology, what it could and could not do:

Astrology is a science, for it is a matter of knowledge and its object is the study and application of certain laws of Nature. Let us get this straight from the start: it is not prophecy. It is not dealing with certainties, but with tendencies. It has a fairly wide margin for error – but it works.36

In Religion and the Decline of Magic, the historian Keith Thomas describes the complex problems an astrologer encounters in trying to interpret what a horoscope is signifying. Although Thomas is writing in the context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the difficulties remained the same in the twentieth and were those de Wohl was likely to face in his work for British Intelligence:

The planets … were only one variable in a densely crowded mosaic of fluctuating constituents – elements, humours, qualities, houses and signs of the zodiac. The client’s own horoscope might also need to be compared with that of the country in which he lived, or those of the other persons with whom he had dealings. The astrologer thus found himself involved in a welter of combinations and permutations which greatly complicated the task of interpretation … Any interpretation was in the last resort bound to be subjective.37

A horoscope can be constructed for a nation, a city, a business, an institution or an organisation in exactly the same way as for an individual. The ‘birth’ of the United Kingdom, for example, is said to be 1 May 1707, when the Act of Union between England and Scotland came into effect. But there is an argument that it is more accurate to say the nation was born on 25 December 1066, the day William ‘the Conqueror’ was crowned, or 1 January 1801, when Ireland was incorporated into the United Kingdom. Similarly, was the Germany de Wohl was dealing with based on the proclamation of 18 January 1871, the birth of the republic on 9 November 1918, or the arrival in power of the Nazis on 30 January 1933? There is less dispute about when the United States was ‘born’: 4 July 1776, the date of the Declaration of Independence. Some states – for example, Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), Thailand, and Myanmar (formerly Burma) – were even established when astrologers calculated what would be propitious times. As with an individual, astrologers go on to claim that it is possible to describe the character of a nation and to make predictions about events in its life and destiny.

The claims for successful astrological prediction on a scale larger than the individual are scarce and rarely convincing. Hitler and Germany would be for de Wohl and British Intelligence a complex and fascinating intermingling of possibilities. De Wohl’s tendency was to take the fate of the leading personalities as the destiny of the nation: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Mussolini. Elizabeth I of England reportedly turned to the court astrologer John Dee to select an auspicious date for her coronation – 15 January 1559. Her reign was long and saw the early flowering of England as a nation state. Was there any connection? Astrologers would say the choice of a propitious date played a positive part in the country’s fortunes. The seventeenth-century astrologer William Lilly – a supporter of Parliament in the English Civil War – is said to have predicted the beheading of King Charles I a year before it took place in 1649. He went on to foretell both the bubonic plague that swept London in 1665 and the devastating Great Fire the following year in his book Monarchy, or No Monarchy in England, published in 1651. Lilly’s forecasts described first ‘a great sickness and mortality … people in their winding-sheets, persons digging graves …’, followed by ‘a great city all in flames of fire’.38

Raphael’s Almanac, which had appeared annually in Britain since 1827, suggested in the 1913 edition that there were strongly marked ‘indications of war and disaster’ for the following year in the horoscope of the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, connecting his individual fate with that of his country and of the European continent. The First World War broke out in 1914. The aspect of Mars square to Saturn in the Kaiser’s chart, another publication said, signified Wilhelm’s inevitable defeat and humiliation, and with these of Germany. In de Wohl’s own time, the often-consulted clairvoyant Cheiro (an Irishman, born William Warner) forecast in 1931 in the magazine World Predictions that the Prince of Wales, Edward, would abandon the throne rather than lose the object of his affection.39 This Edward went on to do five years later. In 1930 the astrologer R.H. Naylor warned in the 5 October edition of the Sunday Express of the imminent danger of an accident involving a British aircraft. As the newspaper was coming off the presses, the airship R101 – bound for India via Egypt on its maiden flight – crashed in flames on a hillside in France with the death of forty-six of the fifty-four crew and passengers.

De Wohl may have claimed astrology was a science, but it was paradoxically a science he believed to be incompatible with rationalism, the harmful roots of which he believed could be found in the French Revolution:

The age of rationalism will soon be called by history the second dark age of mankind. For rationalism has very, very little to do with reason. By their fruits shall ye know them – and these fruits have been materialism, anarchism, nihilism, and the concept of the ant state as the progressive ideal, with everybody working for progress and no one asking in what direction.40

5

By the early 1930s de Wohl’s career as a novelist and screenwriter was thriving and he had become a significant and respected figure in the German film industry. Six of his novels had been adapted for silent films and he found no difficulty in adjusting to the new approaches and techniques the introduction of talkies demanded. His first script involving dialogue was The Last Company for the Ufa company, a film set during Prussia’s war against Napoleon, starring Conrad Veidt, a well-known actor of the period. Veidt fled the Nazis in 1933 with his Jewish wife, moving first to Britain and then to the United States. Among other prominent people in the business de Wohl worked with were the directors Curtis Bernhardt and Henry Koster (born Hermann Kosterlitz), and the screenwriter Carl Mayer, all of whom would be forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933. His closest colleague – who would become a lifelong friend – was the director and producer Joe May, born Joseph Mandel in Vienna in 1880. May left for Hollywood in 1933, establishing himself at Universal Pictures. In each case, Germany’s loss proved to be Hollywood’s gain.

De Wohl was flattered, as he showed in his autobiography, to receive a letter via his publisher from Hermine, wife of ex-Kaiser Wilhelm (living in exile in Holland since Germany’s defeat in the First World War), saying her husband had particularly enjoyed one of his novels. The former Kaiser, she added, read selected excerpts to his entourage every night. Whatever de Wohl produced was now so popular that, as the editor of a Berlin newspaper that serialised his fiction told the not entirely happy writer, ‘You know … we don’t read your novels anymore … We just print them, that’s all.’41 De Wohl responded by producing a book in three months under an assumed name – Edith Alice Gordon, purportedly an English woman living in Berlin – dressing in female clothes and presenting the completed manuscript in person to the editor. The disguise was convincing. The man who shaved three times a day and was rarely without an 8in cigar in his hand passed as a woman. De Wohl revealed himself only after the editor had praised the novel, accepted the work for serialisation and the paper’s accounts department had handed ‘Miss Gordon’ a cheque. He went on to write a series of articles on his experiences living dressed as a woman for ten days, but Hitler’s arrival as Chancellor first delayed and then prevented their publication.42

De Wohl’s interest in astrology continued, running parallel with his career as a writer and his growing involvement in the film industry. Occasionally the two became intertwined, as in an incident early in 1933 involving Alfred Zeisler, the producer and director of the film Gold, the story of a scientist who has discovered the secret of transforming lead into the precious metal, the dream of alchemists. Having already invested over a million marks in the production, but facing obstacle after obstacle, Zeisler began to doubt that Gold would be completed, and if it was whether it would make a profit. De Wohl asked Zeisler his birthdate and, establishing that the Sun was in conjunction with Jupiter in his horoscope (‘a marvellous aspect’), told the producer he need have no fears, success was certain. Zeisler was unconvinced, but work proceeded smoothly until one evening the director, Karl Hartl, complained of a headache. He then went down with a high temperature and a red rash on his face and body. Zeisler was certain financial and artistic disaster loomed and prepared to abandon the project.

De Wohl remained convinced that the astrological advice he had given Zeisler still stood but contacted his mentor Baron von Hoogerwoerd for guidance, giving him Hartl’s birthdate. Hoogerwoerd reported that on the evening Hartl had been struck by the mysterious illness, the planet Neptune was square his ascendant, which suggested the director had suffered food poisoning. All was now well, the baron reported, and the danger had passed. Relieved, Zeisler secured a further injection of 500,000 marks to complete the film. On its release in 1934 the New York Times described Gold as long but ‘thrilling … excellent’.43 But like many others in the industry, the American-born Zeisler felt impelled to leave Germany for Britain in 1935. De Wohl was later to work with him in England on the film Crime over London.

Another of de Wohl’s friends who shared his interest in astrology was the Austrian-born actor and director Fritz Lang, like de Wohl a Roman Catholic of Jewish heritage. Lang had made the ground-breaking science fiction film Metropolis in 1927. His wife, the screenwriter Thea von Harbou, was an ardent Nazi sympathiser and the couple divorced when she took the step of becoming a full party member. Hitler, ironically, had admired two of Lang’s early films, reading them as attacks on the Jews. As the Nazis tightened their grip on power, Lang left Germany for good following a tense meeting in which Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels lavishly praised his work as a film maker but then made pointed remarks about his Jewish ancestry. Goebbels’ ministry had effectively taken control of the cinema industry through the establishment in 1933 of the Reich Film Chamber, which everyone working in the industry was obliged to join. ‘In 1935 and 1936 the Party encouraged cinemagoers to send in enquiries about the racial and political affiliations of leading screen actors.’44 Lang could see the shape of the future under the Nazis, going first to Paris, then to Hollywood where he built a career that spanned two decades.