Mike Burke was the head of CIA operations in Germany during the Cold War. A few years later he was hired by CBS to buy and sell ideas and programming in Europe for a new organization, CBS Europe, a front useful to both CBS and the CIA. For the network, the European arm would have Read More
At the time the French Government would not permit the export of French francs. The money I made from the two features had to remain in the country. While we wanted to buy a small apartment on the Left Bank, our closest friends, Paul André Falcoz and his pharmacist wife Marie Andrée persuaded us to Read More
Thirteen years after the war I decided to return to that territory just over the Dutch-German border. Prummern, Geilenkirchen, and Beeck. Then southeast to Belgium and Marche-en-Famenne. I might have died in any of these places. I had no trouble until I came to the German customhouse on the German border. Though the agents were Read More
As a returning veteran I was entitled to four more college years at government expense. I didn’t take the gift seriously until I heard the same educational benefits could be extended to aviation. I could learn to fly—at government expense. Because my eyes were so poor, I couldn’t become an airline pilot, but I could Read More
I paid little attention to my cinema studies. The course had been put together, logically, for the French. The use of a French built camera we would never use again, French editing equipment we would never handle, and laboratories with indecipherable developing fluids. The course including screenings of the great films the French had made Read More
Now that I had money, I bought a four-seat loge at the Opéra. I asked Captain Pinckney and his Ani to the ballet as my guests. There were three in the box the first two visits, but at the third ballet, there was Tina Soubiran who worked with Ani. She was alone because her boyfriend Read More
The Army maintained our hotel-cum-brothel as a military post. The required Charge-of-Quarters (CQ), a non-commissioned officer, was on duty during regular hours. The former pleasure palace had a built in security system: a button and a two-way speaker from the street to the registration desk where the CQ sat. The doorbell or sonnette would ring Read More
Three months after combat ended I was transferred to Paris to study cinema at Les Hautes Etudes Cinematographique. I spoke little French and had no interest in making motion pictures. I had read the literature prevalent between two wars: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, dos Passos; the whole Grand Tour of disillusionment. Paris was the center of my Read More