friend. There would be one other occasion, but that was to come in a few years’ time.
They went back into the restaurant, to their table. Boris ordered another vodka. He seemed relieved. They held hands across the table.
But now Martha offered a revelation of her own.
“I too am married,” she said.
The intensity of his response startled her. His voice fell and darkened. “Martha, no!” He continued to hold her hands, but his expression changed to one of puzzlement and pain. “Why didn’t
She explained that her marriage had been a secret from the start, to all but her family—that her husband was a banker in New York, she had loved him once, and deeply, but now they were legally separated, with only the technicalities of divorce remaining.
Boris dropped his head to his arms. Under his breath he said something in Russian. She stroked his hair.
He stood abruptly and walked back outside. Martha stayed seated. A few moments later, Boris returned.
“
It was nearly sundown when they left the restaurant and began their drive back toward the city, the top still down. The day had been an important one. Martha recalled small details—the onrushing wind that tore her hair loose from its coil at the back of her head, and how Boris drove with his right arm over her shoulder, his hand cupping her breast, as was often his custom. The dense forests along the roads grew darker in the fading light and exuded a rich autumnal fragrance. Her hair flew behind her in tendrils of gold.
Though neither said so directly, both understood that something fundamental had occurred. She had fallen deeply for this man and could no longer treat him in the same way she treated her other conquests. She had not wanted this to happen, but it had, and with a man whom the rest of the world saw as unsuitable in the extreme.
CHAPTER 26
The Little Press Ball
Every November the Foreign Press Association in Berlin threw a dinner and ball at the Hotel Adlon, a glamorous affair to which many of the city’s most prominent officials, diplomats, and personalities were invited. The event was nicknamed the Little Press Ball because it was smaller and far less constrained than the annual banquet hosted by Germany’s domestic press, which had become even stuffier than usual due to the fact that the country’s newspapers were by now almost wholly under the control of Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment. For the foreign correspondents the Little Press Ball had immense practical value. Wrote Sigrid Schultz, “It is always easier to pump a man for a story after he and his wife—if he has one—have been your guests and danced at your ball than if you see him only in business hours.” In 1933 the Little Press Ball was held on the evening of Friday, November 24, six days before the city’s American population would celebrate Thanksgiving.
Shortly before eight o’clock, the Adlon began receiving the first of a long procession of big cars, many with headlights the size of halved melons. Out stepped an array of senior Nazis, ambassadors, artists, filmmakers, actresses, writers, and of course the foreign correspondents themselves, from countries large and small, all bundled in big coats and furs against the damp, near-freezing air. Among the arrivals were the German state secretary Bernhard von Bulow; Foreign Minister Neurath; French ambassador Francois-Poncet; Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador; and of course the ubiquitous and gigantic Putzi Hanfstaengl. Here too came Bella Fromm, the “Auntie Voss” society columnist, for whom the banquet would prove to be edged with darkest tragedy, albeit of a kind grown increasingly common in the Berlin beyond public view. The Dodds—all four—arrived in their old Chevrolet; Hitler’s vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, came in a significantly larger and fancier car and, like Dodd, also brought his wife, daughter, and son. Louis Adlon, beaming in tux and tails, greeted each splendid arrival, while bellmen took away furs, coats, and top hats.
As Dodd was about to find out, in a milieu as supercharged as Berlin, where every public action of a diplomat accrued exaggerated symbolic weight, even a mere bit of conversational sparring across a banquet table could become the stuff of minor legend.
THE GUESTS MOVED into the hotel, first to the elegant drawing rooms for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, then to the winter-garden hall, beclouded with thousands of hothouse chrysanthemums. The room was always “painfully crowded,” in Schultz’s appraisal, but tradition required that the ball always be held at the Adlon. Custom also called for guests to arrive in formal wear but “without any display of orders or official rank,” as Fromm wrote in her diary, though a few guests anxious to display their enthusiasm for the National Socialist Party wore the drab brown of the Storm Troopers. One guest, a duke named Eduard von Koburg, commander of the SA’s Motorized Forces, walked around wearing a dagger given him by Mussolini.
The guests were shown to their seats at tables of a kind favored by banquet organizers in Berlin, so agonizingly narrow they put guests in arm’s reach of their peers at the opposite side. Such close quarters had the potential to create awkward social and political situations—putting, say, the mistress of an industrialist across from the man’s wife—so the hosts of each table made sure their seating plans were reviewed by various protocol officials. Some juxtapositions simply could not be avoided. The most important German officials had to be seated not only at the head table, which this year was hosted by the American correspondents, but also close to the captains of the table, Schultz and Louis Lochner, chief of the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press, and to the table’s most prominent U.S. figure, Ambassador Dodd. Thus Vice-Chancellor Papen wound up sitting directly opposite Schultz, despite the fact that Papen and Schultz were known to dislike each other.
Mrs. Dodd also took a prominent seat, as did State Secretary Bulow and Putzi Hanfstaengl; Martha and Bill Jr. and numerous other guests filled out the table. Photographers circled and took picture after picture, the flare from their “flashlights” illuminating whorls of cigar smoke.
Papen was a handsome man—he resembled the character Topper as played on television years later by the actor Leo G. Carroll. But he had an unsavory reputation as an opportunist and betrayer of trust and was deemed by many to be arrogant in the extreme. Bella Fromm called him the “Gravedigger of the Weimar Republic,” alluding to Papen’s role in engineering the appointment of Hitler as chancellor. Papen was a protege of President Hindenburg, who affectionately called him Franzchen, or Little Franz. With Hindenburg in his camp, Papen and fellow intriguers had imagined they could control Hitler. “I have Hindenburg’s confidence,” Papen once crowed. “Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak.” It was possibly the greatest miscalculation of the twentieth century. As historian John Wheeler-Bennett put it, “Not until they had riveted the fetters upon their own wrists did they realize who indeed was captive and who captor.”
Dodd too viewed Papen with distaste, but for reasons stemming from treachery of a more concrete variety. Shortly before the United States had entered the past world war, Papen had been a military attache assigned to the German embassy in Washington, where he had planned and abetted various acts of sabotage, including the dynamiting of rail lines. He had been arrested and thrown out of the country.
Once all were seated, conversation ignited at various points along the table. Dodd and Mrs. Papen talked about the American university system, which Mrs. Papen praised for its excellence: during the Papens’ tenure in Washington, their son had attended Georgetown University. Putzi was his usual boisterous self. Even seated he towered above the guests around him. A strained silence occupied the cleft of linen, crystal, and china that separated Schultz and Papen. That a chill existed between them was obvious to all. “When he arrived he was as suave and polite as his reputation required,” Schultz wrote, “but all through the first four courses of the dinner the gentleman ignored [me] with remarkable consistency.” She noted: “This was not easy to do because it was a narrow table and I sat just about three feet opposite him.”
She did all she could to draw Papen into conversation, only to be rebuffed. She had promised herself that she would “try to be the perfect hostess and steer clear of controversial subjects,” but the more Papen ignored her, the less inclined she was to do so. Her resolve, she wrote, “wore thin in the face of Papen’s obvious bad
