Wolfe Frank - Nuremberg's Voice of Doom - The Autobiography of the Chief Interpreter at History's Greatest Trials

In fact Wolfe Frank seems to have been the embodiment of the character described in IF – the kind of man Kipling hopes his son will eventually become.

Certainly Wolfe, in spite of his hedonistic, maverick and cavalier tendencies, could, whenever necessary, be relied upon to keep a cool head in difficult and dangerous situations and to carry out whatever was asked of him – to the highest standards and with the greatest integrity and professionalism. He could be a patient, trusting and forgiving, yet determined man, as he demonstrated during and after his period of internment and throughout his successful campaign (and twenty-three applications) to be allowed to join a fighting unit of the British Army. He proved himself to be equally at ease with the lower ranks and the hoi polloi as he was amongst the officers, the nobles, the gentry and actors in whose company he would so often be found. He was also an optimist, a dreamer and a chancer who took risks, financially and romantically, which sometimes left him bereft of money or love – situations from which he always recovered to fight another day – often to his greater advantage. ‘Triumph and Disaster’? – Wolfe Frank really did ‘treat those two imposters just the same’.

Irresistible to women Wolfe was married five times and had countless affairs, casual relationships and one-night stands. It is true to say that throughout his adult life he was never without a love interest; apart from the months he was interned as an ‘enemy alien’, and even then he was preparing for a liaison with a new conquest at the very moment of his arrest and, within ‘five minutes’ of being released (and looking more like a vagrant than the Army captain he was to become), he was once again invited to share the bed of a an admiring stranger.

Many men also held Wolfe in high esteem and sought his company and friendship. They admired his abilities and his free-spirited approach to life, they envied the ease with which he captured the hearts of the fairer sex, they marvelled at his linguistic skills and his eloquence and they thoroughly enjoyed his bonhomie, his bon viveur and his devil-may-care attitude – especially in those situations where so many would err on the side of caution.

In short Wolfe Frank seems to have been a mixture of Casanova, with whom he had much in common, Cary Grant, the Scarlet Pimpernel, James Bond and Oliver Reed; and he had that rare ability to be a man’s man – a worldly-wise, educated gentleman who possesses class and admits his faults – as well as being a ladies’ man.

Wolfe structured his memoirs around his five marriages and it seems right that I should adopt that format to conclude the Frank (and his remarkably frank) story with some brief biographical details surrounding those five phases of his life, as well as some of the other relationships and involvements he enjoyed, or experienced, in between – or simultaneously!

His short-lived marriage to, and his later relationship with, Baroness Maditta von Skrbensky (1936-37) has been covered by Wolfe within the autobiographical section of this book, save to say that in December 1947 Maditta moved to Canada to marry Colin R. Watson at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto.

Wolfe has likewise explained the wedding ceremony and the early years of his marriage to his second wife, American actress Maxine Cooper (1945-1952) – details of which I have expanded upon in the last chapter – up until the time of his clandestine reporting assignment in 1949 (see also Chapter 38, Note 4).

Following the completion of the project with the NYHT Wolfe and Maxine moved to Paris where he became a scriptwriter. ‘I wrote the odd line here and there for an incredible array of talent – Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra,’ he recalls casually, ‘and there were Canasta lessons by Mary Hemmingway – the great man’s widow.’

In October 1950, the Franks returned to Davos for the winter during which period Wolfe took part in the famous Parsenn Derby downhill ski race, one of the most important events on the international racing scene. Unfortunately, in the middle section of the run, and in full public view, he skidded off the track and badly fractured his leg in two places. Wolfe’s cast was signed by many of the friends who came to visit him including ‘Irwin Shaw, Joshua Logan, Deborah Kerr and many top skiers’. In the months that followed Wolfe supplemented his script writing activities by becoming more involved in his import/export business within the aircraft industry and Maxine returned to her stage career, still using her maiden name.

In September 1951, having discovered Maxine was pregnant, the Franks set sail on the Queen Mary , tickets paid for by Maxine’s father, bound for the USA. They stayed for ten days in a hotel on Central Park and took delivery of a new Ford station wagon, also paid for by Mr Cooper, before travelling down to their new home in Hollywood. Here Wolfe was introduced to many of Maxine’s friends including Ronald and Nancy Regan, Hedy Lamarr, Charles Boyer and Rock Hudson (clearly during his heterosexual phase) an event Wolfe records as follows: ‘The former truck driver cum star addressed Maxine, whom he had just met as my wife: “Whaddaya doin’ fa dinner tammarragh” was the tactful and beautifully spoken enquiry. Her negative reaction produced a shrug of padded shoulders and the ogre flounced off into the night.’

Wolfe invested all his time, energy and money into trying to set up a Davos style ski resort amongst the mountains of Mineral King in California and Maxine gave birth to a son in January. Soon after, however, there were two events that led to the breakdown of their marriage. Driving back from Mineral King one day a horse collided with the Frank’s car and Maxine sustained injuries, including a fractured jaw, for which she was later awarded over $100,000 ($1 million today). This led to Maxine’s mother, Gladys, taking charge of her daughter’s and her grandson’s welfare and to Wolfe being served with divorce papers. Remembering Gladys’ earlier proclamation of, ‘I’ll get you for this you son-of-a-bitch’ following his spurning of her advances, Wolfe believed his mother-in-law had poisoned his wife against him. That may be so, or perhaps his belief that, ‘the occasional fling in the horizontal had long been forgiven (and legally condoned) by Maxine’ was a less than accurate reading of his situation.

Frank left the ensuing court hearing ‘with a car, a few possessions and $12.48 in cash’ – his dreams of opening the ski resort at Mineral King were over.

(In 1957 Maxine married Sy Gomberg, a screenwriter and producer, and retired from the acting profession in the early 1960s to raise a family. The couple remained married until Sy Gomberg’s death in 2001. Maxine became well known as a photographer and as a Hollywood activist standing up for minority groups in the theatre and human rights and against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War. She died, aged eighty-four, in 2009).

Forced to find work following his divorce Wolfe joined a firm of garment manufacturers and sold their products door-to-door. It turned out to be ‘The most incredible, ridiculous and sometimes sordid expedition of my life.’ It is easy to see why Wolfe would think this. Most of his customers were women, left on their own, who were more interested in Wolfe than his wares – and his best customers were those who lived and worked in ‘whorehouses situated on the wrong side of the tracks.’

Wearied and sickened by his fall from grace and the kind of work he had been reduced to carrying out Wolfe secured a position with a local NBC radio station in Las Vegas interviewing visitors in their own languages and translating their replies over the airways for the locals. The series seemed to be going well for both Wolfe and the radio company until the day he received a visit from the Mafia who spoke to him thus: ‘Okay Frank, you don’t wanna do no radio show around here, no more than you wanna hole in ya head. You’re gettin outa town, like today, see? The Mafia feared that one of my interviewees might say something detrimental about Vegas or the casinos.’ Wolfe wisely left town the same evening and, as his visitors had predicted, NBC had no difficulty in releasing him from his contract!