Although the German-American actor Peter van Eyck was one of the best-known figures to pass through Camp Ritchie, his biography is remarkably spotty and error-ridden.1 One thing, however, is certain: although he played the quintessential Nazi soldier in many American films, he served the United States in real life with distinction as a loyal American Army officer.
His birth name was Goetz, and he was born to Emil and Else (Petzke) Eick on July 16, 1913, in Steinwehr, Germany. This village is now known as Kamienny Jaz and is part of Poland, but until the Second World War it was part of Prussian Pomerania. Emil Eick was the successful tenant farm director of well over 1,000 acres there, following a family tradition going back at least six generations. The actual owner of the land was the German emperor, but the Eicks had always been allowed to cultivate it as they saw fit.
Emil hated the Nazis and was against them ever since the 1928 federal election when, for the first time, the Nazis managed to capture 3% of the popular vote. Emil also hated the Prussian aristocrats, or “Junkers,” for not doing more to prevent the Nazis from coming to power three years later. He was not, as Peter’s biographers would have it, part of that aristocratic class; he was not a land-owner, and he was not part of the military. His service had been to spend two years in East Africa as an “Imperial Economy Director,” where he had used his expertise to help build up local agriculture and cattle breeding.
Somehow, however, the myth would arise in Hollywood that Emil was a Junker who raised Goetz with the expectation that he would become a military officer. This myth, developed by Hollywood publicists— doubtless with Goetz’s input—gave a more dramatic background to his portrayals of German Nazi officers in so many Hollywood films.
Goetz grew up together with two brothers and two sisters on the Steinwehr farm.2 Most of the farm was devoted to the cultivation of vegetables, but there were work horses on the farm that Goetz rode, and he developed a passion for horseback riding—and for the piano. He attended the Realgymnasium in Hermsdorf, Germany, then left home to study music at the studio theater (Kammerspiele) in Munich.
He spent only a very brief time there before leaving Munich for Berlin. It appears that he did so in order to work with Erik Charell (né Erich Löwenberg). This highly popular Jewish theater and film director, who was 19 years older than Goetz, had created a new German art form that combined unintegrated German revue numbers with operetta plots, and mixed German operetta music with popular songs and jazz and with performances by seductive dancing girls. Erik said he had been influenced by Broadway revues, such as the Ziegfield Follies, to modernize the rather stodgy German operettas which had not changed since the First World War. He did not simply imitate Broadway, however; he introduced risqué jokes, female nudity, attractive young boy groups, musical hits from Germany and the States (including Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”). In 1930 he was at the height of his career, and was preparing the Berlin premiere of what would be his greatest triumph to date: Im weißen Rößl (The White Horse Inn), which opened in November with a cast of well over 200 people. Goetz became part of the huge apparatus supporting this work even as he continued to develop his own musical style by introducing American syncopation into his piano compositions.
Erik Charell’s musicals were well suited to Berlin of the 1920s and 30s, since they were an exalted response to the homosexual dance clubs and seedy cabarets that existed in the city. A young English novelist, Christopher Isherwood, described the scene as Goetz experienced it and even turned an episode of Goetz’s life into a well-known work of fiction, the novella entitled Sally Bowles. In this novella, which later became the basis for the musical Cabaret, “Sally” gets pregnant and is forced to get an abortion before leaving Berlin and returning home to Britain. In reality, Goetz was the man who impregnated her.
Christopher changed (of course) the names and personality traits of his figures. This is the true story: Christopher became friends with the free-spirited British transplant Jean Ross in late 1930, and they shared a Berlin flat for a time. Jean, who would later become a serious British journalist and political activist, was, in 1930, an aspiring actress and part-time cabaret performer. Even in the hedonistic society in which she moved she stood out for her unapologetic immodesty and sexual promiscuity. Goetz was one of her sexual partners, and she became pregnant with his child. Christopher arranged for Jean to have an abortion; he even claimed to be the father in order to facilitate the arrangement. The abortion proved to be a botched and dangerous procedure, and Christopher was blamed by many for getting Jean into this situation. It is unclear how much Goetz knew about the aborted pregnancy, since, at the time, he had already left the country in order to accompany Erik Charell’s production team to London.
There Erik reworked Im weißen Rößl for a London crowd, dampening some of the bawdiness of its humor and the sexual innuendos in its presentation. In London The White Horse Inn enjoyed nearly as much popularity as it had in Berlin. After its closing Goetz accompanied Erik to Paris for its highly successful French premiere, and Erik began making plans for a production in New York.
By now Goetz was an important part of Erik’s production team. When Erik made exploratory trips to New York to make arrangements for its performance there, Goetz accompanied him as his “secretary,” first, on a two-month visit in 1933, then for six months in 1934, and finally for a longer stay in 1935. By this time the Nuremberg Laws had been enacted in Germany, and all of Erik’s production contracts there were cancelled. Neither Erik nor Goetz returned to Germany; Goetz maintained a foothold in Paris before coming to New York to help prepare for the opening of The White Horse Inn at Rockefeller Center’s Center Theater.3 But he was forced to leave for Cuba in order to wait out the time between an elapsed visa and a permanent one. When he returned to make a home in New York in 1937, The White Horse Inn was no longer playing at the Center Theater, but by now Goetz had a number of contacts through which he hoped to further his own career.
First, though, he changed his last name from Eick to van Eyck, a Dutch name that created distance from his German heritage while at the same time suggesting an aristocratic origin. This name was lifted from that of the Dutch Renaissance artist Jan van Eyck and led to incessant teasing by those who had known him before; they began calling him “The Count.”
Goetz hoped to get work as a composer, but relied on performing as a bar pianist in order to make a steady living. He first made the newspapers, however, as neither pianist nor composer, but rather as a participant in a bar room brawl in Congers, New York, a hamlet located about 20 miles north of New York City. The newspapers reported that a Palisades antiques dealer named George Connors was brought to the hospital in Nyack in a semi-conscious condition, where it was determined that he had suffered internal bleeding as a result of a severe punch to the abdomen. His condition was serious enough that his life hung in the balance for several days. Goetz admitted that he was the one who had struck the blow, testifying that he had struck him only after he had been “continuously provoked throughout the evening and during the course of a day of festivities among members of Connors’ set.” No more details were ever relayed regarding the incident, since Connors told a member of the district attorney’s office that, if he should recover from the effects of the brawl—and he did—he did not want to press charges against Goetz.4 This action effectively exonerated Goetz by implying that Connors’ actions had indeed instigated the attack.
Meanwhile, Erik Charell hired Goetz to help him mount a new grand production—Swingin’ the Dream, a jazz version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in 1890s New Orleans. It featured quite a number of famous Black performers: Maxine Sullivan as Titania, Louis Armstrong as Bottom, and Butterfly McQueen, fresh from her triumph in the film Gone with the Wind, as Puck. All in all, the musical featured a 150-member cast and three jazz bands, including Benny Goodman’s mixed-race band. Goetz was hired as stage manager.
Swingin’ the Dream opened on November 29, 1939, but closed after only thirteen performances. Several reasons have been given for its failure: that audiences weren’t ready for a Black production of Shakespeare, that the cavernous Center Theater was simply too large for the intimacy of jazz, that the blending of Shakespearean language with southern idiom was jarring, that the Black musicians and singers were not given the freedom to improvise.5 It was a severe blow to Erik Charell, but Goetz benefitted from the production, since it was there he met his future wife, Ruth Ford, who, as one of the few white, non-singing actresses in the cast, had the role of Polly.
A Mississippian by birth, Ruth Ford had followed her brother, the Bohemian poet and collage artist Charles Henri Ford, to New York in the 1930s, where she quickly entered his circle of “crazy, fascinating people.”6 As a southern beauty with a soft Mississippian accent, Ruth had served as a model for photographers Carl Van Vechten, Man Ray and Cecil Beaton; she had appeared on the covers of Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle, and the Paris and London issues of Vogue and Harpers before joining Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater in 1938 and making her Broadway debut in his revival of Thomas Dekker’s Elizabethan comedy
Shoemaker’s Holiday. In 1940 she was called one of the ten most beautiful women in America, and she found her match in Goetz van Eyck, whom playwright Tennessee Williams called not only “excruciatingly beautiful” but, wearing “very sheer silky trousers and a pale green shirt unbuttoned to reveal his pale gold chest,” “the most exciting man I have ever looked at.”7 She and Goetz were married in Manhattan on January 29, 1940, with Ruth’s mother serving as one witness and a friend of her brother’s, the Russian surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew, as the other. When Ruth gave birth to daughter Shelley one year later, Orson Welles served as godfather.
While Ruth remained active with the Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater, Goetz continued his work as composer and bar pianist. Some of his first collaborative efforts had been with John Latouche, an American lyricist who was writing risqué comic songs for Spivy LaVoe (née Bertha Levine), a Brooklyn-born cabaret singer and pianist whom many referred to as a female Noel Coward. She performed nightly in the back room of Tony’s, a bar-restaurant on West 52nd Street that catered to a largely gay crowd. Here Spivy performed 10 to 15 selections each evening, a great many of them with Latouche lyrics (“Gonna end up in Harlem / With my end up in Harlem”).8 Already in late 1937 Goetz was writing the music to many of Latouche’s pieces for Spivy, and this continued the following year.
But the most famous performer for whom Goetz composed songs was doubtless the “incomparable” Hildegarde, whom Eleanor Roosevelt once called “the First Lady of the Supper Clubs.” In 1940 she was at the peak of her career; she had been featured on a 1939 Life magazine cover, and Revlon had named a shade of lipstick and nail polish “Hildegarde Rose” in her honor. Goetz wrote several songs for her, including “There’s My Heart at the Other End of the Table” and “Dream On.”9
Both Ruth and Goetz were involved in summer stock in 1940, she as actress, he as composer for four musicals written by Alex Kahn. A Hollywood playwright noticed Ruth’s beauty and her acting talent, and got Columbia Pictures to offer her a contract. She and Goetz left for Hollywood with high hopes, she for success as a serious film actress, Goetz for work as a Hollywood film composer. And they declared their intent to make their move permanent when, in November 1941, the newspapers reported that they were having a house built for them in Hollywood.
However, both were disappointed at their initial reception there. When asked several times to pose for pin-up photos, Ruth replied a bit testily: “Hollywood is welcome to all the talent I
may possess, but my legs are strictly a personal proposition. […] I’m trying to make good as a dramatic actress, instead of as a dancer or bathing beauty.”10 And Goetz discovered that Hollywood was full of musical talent and there was no room for a new composer. “I found out,” he said wryly, “that I was no Irving Berlin.”11 Ruth did indeed get acting jobs, lots of them: two already in 1941, twelve in 1942, six in 1943, but many were minor or even uncredited roles, and most were B-list movies. It would not be until 1944 that she would get a major role in an “A” movie: as President Wilson’s eldest daughter Margaret in the film Wilson. Goetz finally gave up on getting into the Hollywood music industry and took a job driving a furniture delivery truck.
Then Goetz’s career took a different path when he was “discovered” during a delivery of furniture by Gummo Marx, a lesser-known Marx brother who was a Hollywood film agent. Gummo recognized his potential and took him to lunch at the 20th Century-Fox studio. Suddenly it was Goetz as well as Ruth who wanted to act in films. At first he found nothing except two uncredited roles as a Gestapo officer in Hitler’s Children and Hitler’s Madman, but then a social friend, Hollywood Director Billy Wilder, recommended him to Hollywood writer/producer Nunnally Johnson for a role in The Moon Is Down, and Peter was called in for a reading. Several well-seasoned actors had vied for the role, but it was given to Goetz, even though he had never had any acting training.
It was Ruth who gave Goetz his new American first name. At a dinner party, she, Goetz, and Billy Wilder discussed the fact that his name “had to be changed.” It was probably Goetz who suggested he be called Jan, in order to make his tribute to the Dutch artist complete, but Ruth objected, saying to her dinner guests: “People would call him everything from John to Yahn and as it’s going to be my name, too, I want something simple. I think I’d like my husband to be called Peter.” And, from that point on, Goetz answered to this new, American name. 12
And Peter’s first film role was a major coup. As Hollywood reporter Ida Belle Hicks reported it: “Van Eyck, a musician, accompanied his pretty wife to Hollywood. She is a Broadway actress who decided she wanted to get into pictures. But it was Peter the studios wanted.”13
The Moon Is Down was based upon a John Steinbeck novel that dealt with the German occupation of a small town in Norway. Peter played Lieutenant Tonder, a disillusioned young Nazi officer who seeks friendship with a Norwegian woman without realizing that he had killed her husband; she avenges her husband’s death by stabbing Tonder to death with a pair of scissors.
A Hollywood columnist reported that, while Peter was filming one of the film’s highly dramatic scenes, a “sad and haunting melody” popped into his mind. He submitted it to Alfred Newman, the studio music director, who said that, “If its fits in with the rest of the score it likely will be used.”14 There is no record as to whether it did fit in with the film score, but it is noteworthy that Peter was still hopeful that Hollywood would recognize his musical talents.
In any case, Peter’s performance as Lieutenant Tonder proved to be a breakout role for him and, throughout his life, he would appear in a string of films in the role of a German officer, often that of a Nazi afflicted with some doubt or misgivings. In 1943 he appeared as a German soldier, uncredited, in “Edge of Darkness,” “Action in the North Atlantic,” and “Interrogation of Enemy Airmen.” The last of these films, “Interrogation of Enemy Airmen,”
was a short documentary produced by the First Motion Picture Unit of the US Army Air Forces for training methods of interrogation for the purpose of extracting useful information from enemy flyers. Ironically, in 1944, Peter would appear in another US Army Air Forces training film, “Resisting Enemy Interrogation,” which depicted the clever interrogation techniques used by Germans against downed American flyers. This full-length documentary featured the likes of Arthur Kennedy, Lloyd Nolan, Poldi Dur, and Mel Torme, all uncredited, and was nominated for an Academy Award.
But Peter was lucky to land one more strong role in a 1943 A-film: as Lt. Schwegler in Billy Wilder’s “Five Graves to Cairo.” This role opened up because the actor Billy Wilder had hoped to cast in the film, Helmut Dantine, was unavailable. Peter now stepped in to portray a seemingly sympathetic Nazi who proves to be as ruthless as his fellow soldiers, before he is killed by the film’s hero. As one reviewer said, with some hyperbole: Peter van Eyck “knows how the typical Nazi soldier walks, eats, fights, loves and reacts. He has the entire Nazi human behavior pattern down to a ‘T.’ He lived with it, and he knows it, and this insight into the German character is what lends such realism and authenticity to his roles.” It would be more correct to say that Peter understood the German soldier because his anti-Nazi brother Eick had been forced to join the German army; Eick had been sent to the Russian front, where he was shot in the lungs, then, thankfully, transported back to Berlin for treatment. The Hollywood press was quick to point out that Peter, too, “condemns naziism. He left Germany, his family, everything and everyone he loves because of it.”15 And it also pointed out that in June, 1943, Peter had entered a Los Angeles courtroom and taken the oath of American citizenship.
Despite his film activity, 1943 was not an entirely bright year for Peter. In August he was in the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital recuperating from “injuries that might have ended his career.” While trying to get his car out of the garage, “the brake slipped and he went through the back wall, plunging 60 feet down an embankment.” His face was badly injured and he required extensive plastic surgery.16 Only 10 weeks later, Peter suffered a diving accident that “tore half the skin off his face.”17 Again, surgery restored Peter’s good looks, but the fresh boyishness of his face was now replaced by a finely sculpted masculinity.
Interestingly enough, 1944 broke Peter’s pattern of playing German soldiers, and he was featured in two A-list films as a Nazi resister: in The Imposter, in which he played a member of the Free French Army who is killed by a German patrol in North Africa; and in Address Unknown, in which he takes revenge against his Nazi collaborator father for not rescuing his Jewish fiancée from the Gestapo. He also took time during filming to compose at least one new song, “Journey’s End,” and to buy an art work by Herman Cherry that had been featured in the second of these two films.
And then Peter enlisted in the United States Army. Ruth threw a large farewell cocktail party for him before he reported for duty in April; guests included his friends and, especially, hers: Geraldine Fitzgerald, Harold Clurman, John Hodiak, William Faulkner, Oscar Homolka, Vincent Price, Otto Preminger, Paul Lucas, Clifford Odets, Gregory Peck, Lee Strasberg, and, of course, Billy Wilder.18
According to Ruth, Peter’s service started out rather badly: while doing KP service, a whole side of beef fell on his foot and broke his big toe. Still, Peter completed his basic training at Fort Bliss, El Paso Texas, and was then assigned to an antiaircraft replacement unit at the camp.
He expected to be sent abroad, but suddenly in October 1944 he was transferred to Camp Ritchie to train in military intelligence; he was placed in the 24th class with a specialization in the interrogation of German prisoners of war (IPW). Classmate Henry Bretton recalled “with
pleasure” his association with “the famous German-American movie actor Peter van Eyck” who was “seated next to me in Camp Ritchie’s instruction class.”18 It was probably startling to Peter’s classmates to see a cinematic Nazi soldier sitting in their midst, more startling still when he assumed the role of Nazi prisoner in their class interrogation exercises. The men who assumed these roles “were trained to act the part of the different types of German the interrogator was likely to meet on the field of battle,” George Bailey recalled. Peter “always played a high-ranking Prussian staff officer, arrogant but correct; he would respond with extremely valuable information if the interrogator could find a way to appeal to his code of honor.”20 It must have been exhilarating for the men to write home that they had performed a “scene” of Nazi interrogation with the well-known Hollywood actor.
After successfully completing his studies as a German interrogator, Peter received a direct commission as a Second Lieutenant on January 3, 1945. He was alerted on January 30, but didn’t ship out to the European Theatre of Operations until March. During this time he remained at Camp Ritchie, doubtless continuing his service for Ritchie’s interrogation classes by posing as a Nazi war prisoner.
And it was while he was stationed at Camp Ritchie that the Hollywood columnists reported that Peter’s marriage to Ruth Ford was on the rocks. In late January 1945 Louella Parsons reported that “Lt. Peter van Eyck has given his wife […] the necessary permission and she’ll file suit for divorce this week.”21 Peter returned to California on a ten-day leave in February, prior to his departure to the European front, even as Ruth was beginning divorce proceedings against him.
Professional differences doubtless led to the divorce, but the immediate cause appears to have been Ruth’s falling in love with the playwright/screenwriter Dwight Taylor, who was, Hollywood reported, also in the throes of getting a divorce. In September 1945 Dorothy Kilgallen noted that actress “Laurette Taylor’s son, Dwight, will waltz down the aisle with Ruth Ford when her divorce from Peter van Eyck is final,”22 while Walter Winchell reported in November: “When Ruth Ford, sooo pretty, gets her decree from Peter van Eyck, she will middle-aisle it with the heir of a famous stage star, not yet unwound himself.”23 Alas for Ruth, that was not to be. Dwight Taylor married instead costume designer Natalie Visart in March 1946. Ruth’s divorce from Peter remained uncompleted, and she would not remarry until July 1952, when she and film actor Zachary Scott tied the knot in Chicago.
Meanwhile, Peter was part of a shipment of 40 officers and 45 enlisted men that sailed to Europe from Camp Kilmer, New Jersey on March 2. Special orders assigned him as one of two officers to the six-man IPW Team 215 attached to the XXIII Army Corps of the Twelfth Army Group. These orders were dated April 26, 1945, one day after the U.S. 69th Infantry Division met the First Ukrainian Front near Torgau at the Elbe River, and 12 days before the German surrender. As a consequence, Peter’s wartime experiences were minimal. Instead, Hollywood reported, “Lt. Peter van Eyck is in Germany helping to find the Nazi War criminals.”24 The other officer on his team, Michael Weyl put it this way: “Since there were no longer hardly any prisoners of war, [we] interviewed Werewolves.”25 This was the term used to describe German guerrilla forces that had operated secretly behind Allied lines in the last months of the war; now the term referred to those unrepentant Nazis who were still actively sabotaging Allied efforts and trying to keep the Nazi dream alive.
Peter was working with various subdivisions of the 223rd counterintelligence corps; he was not only interrogating Nazis and Nazi suspects, but also screening personnel, contacting informants, and investigating individual cases. His IPW team’s work included a number of raids of saboteur cells and the discovery of equipment caches in the Trier-Saarbrücken area. At the end of the year Peter was promoted to First Lieutenant and left active Army service to serve in Berlin as Film Officer for the Information Services Control Section of OMGUS (Office of Military Government, United States), under the oversight of Brig. General Robert McClure.
The initial purpose of the Information Control Division (ICD) was to promote democratic values in Germany by controlling and altering its media. Its officers would do this by removing people with Nazi ties from the media and prohibiting overly nationalist content in all the new media outlets.
All German movie theaters had been immediately shut down at the end of the war, and many of the German film studios had been repurposed as storage units and army barracks. When Peter first entered the film control office of the ICD, things were slowly opening up again. The task of the film control office was now to help confiscate and evaluate existing German film stock for possible release and to grant licenses to new film producers. During this period of meager German film production, Peter was also responsible for the distribution of American films that the American officials selected as ones promoting wholesome, democratic values.
This was a thankless task. American film producers had first claimed—with perhaps some justification—that the presence of Hollywood figures in the ICD gave the office an unfair bias regarding the films selected for release in Germany. Soon, however, Hollywood producers discovered there was little money to be made in Germany and there was a sudden paucity of American films offered up for viewing there. Furthermore, in 1947 the Cold War became an American priority in Germany; the ICD’s focus now turned from denazification to using Germany as a center of psychological warfare against the USSR. The search for appropriate American films now became even more difficult, since Washington politicians were casting a suspicious eye on Hollywood and ferreting out filmmakers and screenwriters whom they suspected of communist tendencies. Like many of the Ritchie Boys, Peter believed that America’s chief aim in Germany should be denazification and democratization, and that these interests were being side-lined by America’s Cold War interests. He also resented the fact that, after dismantling the powerful German film industry, Hollywood was creating films that depicted the German postwar situation from an American perspective.
Peter remarked, that, “with the beginning of 1948, it dawned on me that two years of Army and three of Military Government were about all I wanted and more than that. The situation in Berlin became more and more untenable—all our old mistakes had their revenge […]—I did not want to sign up for another year—so I quit. Went to my incomparable Paris and lived like a human being, which seemed very much like a dream to me.”26 Paris was—and always remained—a drawing card for Peter, because his favorite sister, Else Eick Dauphin-Menier, had married and settled there. And he signed on to return to the movies in a film that celebrated the end to the long-standing American taboo against fraternization between Americans and Germans.
Peter joined this new film project with the hope that it would offer a German perspective on this subject; he felt it would be “a blessed divergence from the Billy Wilder or Howard Hawks versions.” Unfortunately, however, he found that “the first script was too unbelievable German speak heavy” [i.e. too much dialogue] and the latter one “all too light in weight.”27
The film, called Hallo Fräulein! tells how the jazz-loving American officer occupying a small German town organizes a concert featuring a young German songstress of classical training. As one film scholar put it, the film is an interesting hybrid that combines “conventions of the
Hollywood backstage musical […] with those of the German musical revue of the 1930s and 1940s. […] Fittingly, the dialogue moves between English and German and the music alternates between American jazz numbers and German folk songs, melding at times into a strange mixture of the two.”28 The film was designed as a vehicle for the songstress Margot Hielscher, who, in this film, is tutored in jazz by the American officer but, in the end, chooses a German suitor over the kindly American. It seems that the film was originally intended to be a metaphor for the American occupational government gradually giving way to responsible German self-rule. At the same time, the film reflected the real lives of its performers: Peter as bar pianist and American soldier, Margot as entertainer of German troops followed by post-war experiences of interrogation and reinstatement as a performer in occupied Germany.
Hallo Fräulein! was released in 1949. It was Peter’s first German film, although produced under OMGUS control. Appropriately, then, he appeared in the uniform of an American Army major and was featured in publicity outlets as an “American” film actor.
Peter recognized that Hallo Fräulein! was not the quality of film he had wished for, but it did in fact “make a lot of money” and put Peter “back in harness again.” He realized again that film-making is “a great deal of fun.” He said he suspected, in fact, that “a great deal of the fun lies in the fact that I am in a position where I can put over something on somebody, i.e. do something which is ridiculously simple while commonly regarded as something rather difficult.” With no training and no stage experience to bolster him, he had nevertheless become a major film star. And, he added: “All goes far more easily than five years ago. It is such a lark, no more[…]. If, in this totally insane world, I manage to find a niche in which I can work sufficiently successful[ly] to buy a painting here and there and to live like a human being I shall feel that I have shouldered all which was laid upon me when I was born.” Although “I am still unhappy that No La Brea Terr [his home in Los Angeles] and Ruth and Shelley were not where I belonged.”
By 1949 Peter was not only once again active as a film actor —it was also the year that he and his former wife met after an absence of five years, reestablished a speaking relationship, and began completing the paperwork necessary for finalizing their divorce. During their separation Peter had been angry over one thing: that Ruth had kept their young daughter Shelley from spending time with him during the postwar years. “She would never send me Shelley, and I asked her a thousand times,” he said. If she had, Shelley “would speak German and French fluently by now[,] not to mention what else she would have gained by the mere absence from [Ruth’s bohemian] clique for a while.”29 This would remain a bone of contention, and it must have hurt him deeply when Ruth married Zachary Scott in 1952, and he adopted Shelley as his own. Shelley van Eyck now became Shelley Scott. Fortunately, she was able to seek Peter out on her own after she turned eighteen, and, from 1959 onward, she and Peter maintained a close relationship.
Peter threw himself into film, declaring that “short of being in the army, it’s the easiest life I’ve ever had.” 1950 saw him acting in five German films that varied in genre from two crime stories (one a musical crime film!), to a love story, to a story of post-war recovery, to the true mystery of a sunken ship. In at least two of these he portrayed Americans. But Peter was dissatisfied with the state of German film-making. “I made six pictures—all of them stinkers,” he declared, “but I did play the lead in all of them.”30 He now made an effort to expand his horizons. In looking elsewhere, he did land a minor, uncredited part in the Twentieth Century-Fox production The Desert Fox, taking the role (no small surprise) of a German army officer.
It was, finally, the 1953 French film Wages of Fear that marked Peter’s breakthrough to international stardom. The director Henri-Georges Clouzot cast him as Bimba, one of four drifters hired to truck explosives over the dangerously rough roads of Central America. Before setting out on this suicide mission the audience learns the back story of the other three drifters, while Bimba is portrayed as a mysterious loner and laconic on-looker. On the mission, however, he more than proves his mettle. Shortly before he is killed, when his driving companion tells him admiringly that he is by far the bravest of the four men, Bimba opens up enough to tell him that he had spent three years of forced labor in the Nazi salt mines and that his present task was “a piece of cake” in comparison.
The film won the Grand Prix at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival and cemented Peter’s reputation as a forceful film actor. It also changed his image. Clouzot had insisted that Peter bleach his hair white for the role of Bimba, and, in the years ahead, most of Peter’s producers and directors asked that he have bleached white hair, especially in films in which he played Nazis or East German Communists. Peter didn’t like it. “Look at the stuff!” he exclaimed. “It’s just like straw, and I have to bleach it at least once a week to keep the dark brown natural color of my hair from showing.”31 He was now hired to perform in films made by French, Italian, German, and American directors, including such greats as Orson Welles and Fritz Lang.
Television now presented a new format for film actors. Peter acted in many European and American TV serial dramas, such as Orient Express, Public Defender, Crusader, Adventures of Ellery Queen, Front Row Center, Code Three, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
And he cemented his personal life in 1952 by marrying Ingeborg (Inge) de Foris et Foris-Valois, whom he had met while she was working for the Americans directly after the war. She came from an old, aristocratic French Huguenot family that had resettled in Germany in the late 16th century and had Germanized its name to “von Foris.” She was born in Cologne, grew up in Hamburg, and then moved to Berlin, where, after serving six months as a shorthand typist in the chancellery of naval headquarters, entered the Friedrich Wilhelm University (now Humboldt University), to study and earn a doctorate in art history with a dissertation on the life and work of the Bavarian Baroque architect Johann Dientzenhofer.
From November 1945 until September 1946 Inge was employed by the US military government as a consultant in the department for monuments, fine arts, and archives. Another employee there, Henry C. Alter, was clearly smitten with her, and described her in late 1945 as “the ideal of a female, one hundred percent North German, slender, tall, blonde, with sparkling blue eyes”— “a princess in a pullover, an angel who could curse without coming across as offensive.” She was, he enthused, “completely natural, neither too aggressive nor too guarded.”32
Her appearance and her lively spirit belied a traumatic event that had occurred two years before Peter and Inge met. She had been engaged to Oskar Kusch, a handsome young submarine commander who, like Inge, had pronounced anti-Nazi tendencies. On a joint ski holiday in January 1944, Oskar had suddenly been recalled to the German submarine base in Lorient, then put on trial and condemned to death for having “undermined the fighting spirit” of his crew members by repeatedly uttering criticisms of the Nazis and of Hitler in their presence. He was executed for this “crime” in May 1944.
It was while working as a consultant for the Information Control Division in Berlin that Inge met Henry Alter, a Ritchie Boy and a close friend of Peter’s. When Henry was called away to serve as control officer for theater and culture in Vienna, he asked his friend Peter to look after her. She and Peter met, fell in love, and were soon inseparable. Money was tight. They left Berlin for Hamburg in 1948, where they lived on a boat while Inge worked as a freelancer for the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk [Northwest German radio]. They then moved to a tiny flat in Paris, just around the corner from where Peter’s sister Else made her home, and they were married there on January 15th, 1952.
Later that year they moved to the States. This, Inge said, was done for financial reasons: the US Army gave compensation to former American officers of OMGUS only on the condition that they returned to the United States. With this money Peter was able to buy a little house in Pacific Palisades; they lived there until 1957, at which point Inge, having now lived in the US for five years, was able to get American citizenship. Their daughter Kristina was born there in 1954; another daughter, Claudia, was born in 1961.
Inge was never happy in California, since Peter was now getting film work in Europe and was frequently absent from home. And so Peter and Inge returned to Paris in 1957 and again acquired a modest flat in Saint Germains, close to the home of Peter’s sister. But Peter’s success in Wages of Fear now brought in higher salaries, and he and Inge began looking for a home that matched their tastes: one that was Baroque, yet simple in style and affordable. Properties in France were too expensive, but Peter’s brother Eick found for them a modest property in Switzerland— a small 1606 castle. called “Bergsteig,” or “Mountain Climb,” in St. Margrethen in the canton of Saint Gallen. Peter and Inge renovated the house and moved in in 1959. They would live there until Peter’s death.
Inge was grateful for the salary Peter earned from movies, but she was not really interested in his film work and in the make-believe figures he played. And Peter said: “I have a highly developed family sense. Neither my wife nor my children are ever going to see in me the personality traits the cinema has created for me.” 33
Film scholar Tim Bergfelder has perhaps defined van Eyck’s screen presence best: “Van Eyck’s on-screen image was often that of an outsider (either in sexual or in national terms), a cool, arrogant, elegantly dressed, cosmopolitan dandy with an aristocratic demeanor, whose behavior could shift between laid-back charm, narcissist vanity, brooding cynicism, and outbursts of ruthless brutality and physical violence. As such, van Eyck’s roles alternated between villains and heroes.”34
Some of the postwar films in which Peter played the role of German Nazi soldier or East German Stasi agent are The Desert Fox (1951), Sailor of the King (1953), A Bullet for Joey (1954), Attack! (1956), Run for the Sun (1956), Rommel Calls Cairo (1959), The Longest Day (1962), The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965), Requiem for a Secret Agent (1966), Red Roses for the Führer (1968), and The Bridge at Remagen (1969).
But in Europe, especially in Germany, he played a much wider variety of character types, such as a womanizing Frenchman (Rosemary), a police inspector (Dr. Crippen Lives), a schoolteacher (Dirty Angel) and a murderer (The Snorkel) in 1958 alone. He also played a notorious arms dealer (Burning Fuse, 1957), an industrialist (The Rest Is Silence, 1959), a Viennese wine merchant (The Devil’s Agent, 1962), a mad scientist (The Brain, 1962), and an architect (An Alibi for Death, 1963). He played in three of the German Dr. Mabuse films, in three westerns, and in one Tarzan movie. He was put under contract by a British film company to play the virile gamekeeper in a film version of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but even he was skeptical about its passing the censors. After reading the first draft, he remarked “The screenplay does a good deal of suggesting. It will need a divinely light directorial hand.”35 He was right: the project never came to fruition.
By the late 1950s Peter had clearly achieved what he had wished for in 1948: he had managed to find a niche where he was successful enough to afford some luxuries and to “live like a human being.” And in doing so, he could feel that he had “shouldered all which was laid upon me when I was born.”
Unfortunately, this happy condition did not continue as long as he would have wished. Peter was a lifelong smoker, and the first sign of trouble came early in 1968 when he was hospitalized in Zurich for intense chest pain. He was diagnosed as having pleurisy. To Inge’s distress, Peter did not give up smoking even then, nor even when he developed venous thrombosis later that year. The Swiss doctors treated this, but they could not prevent its constant recurrence. Peter was given blood thinners and was now required to wear special thrombosis socks, even while he was on set shooting the 1968 western film Shalako. But Peter still didn't stop smoking. His doctors made plans for him to go to the States on July 16th, 1969 for treatment at the Mayo clinic, but by then it was too late. He died of a pulmonary embolism in a clinic in Männedorf (near Zurich) on the 15th of July, one day before his 56th birthday. 36
Peter was buried in the Catholic cemetery in St. Margrethen. His gravestone gave his name as Goetz Peter Van Eyck. It also included lines from a poem by William Faulkner, who had been a close friend of his first wife: “Though I be dead/ This soil that holds me fast/ Will find me breath.”37
Beverley Driver Eddy
July 2024
I am grateful to Kristina van Eyck for helping me separate fact from fiction.
Although numerous sources state that van Eyck was born in 1911, this 1913 birthdate is the one given on all the important documents of his life: his birth certificate, his draft card, and his marriage license.
I have been unable to find evidence that he spent time in Tunis and Algiers, as several biographies state.
“Assault Case Probe Halted,” Rockland County Journal News (NY), 8 July 1938, 1.
See James Shapiro, “A midsummer night’s sax comedy: the return of the lost Shakespeare jazz musical.”https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/jan/06/swingin-deream-louis-armstrong-bottom-lost-shakespeare-musical-midsummer-nights-return for photos and a discussion of this production.
“Ruth Ford Dies at 98; Actress Was Member of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre,” Los Angeles Times, 16 Aug., 2009
Cited in Peter Parker, Isherwood: A Life Revealed. New York: Random House, 2004, 192.
Howard Pollack, The Ballad of John Latouche: an American Lyricist’s Life and Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, 42.
Hedda Hopper, “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” The Honolulu Advertiser, 17 Feb. 1943, 6. Although many biographers state that Goetz collaborated with Aaron Copeland, worked as stage manager for Irving Berlin, and was directorial assistant for Orson Welles, Goetz never mentioned this in his interviews. Moreover, Irving Berlin was composing music, not mounting stage productions. Nor have I found any reference to collaboration or production assistance in the Copeland and Berlin archives.
“Harry Martin, “Footlights and Flickers,” The Commercial Appeal [Memphis TN], 22 Oct. 1941, 11.
“A Movie Star Finds Acting ‘Easiest Life’,” Lexington Leader (KY), 24 Apr. 1953, 6.
Marjory Adams, “Actress Ruth Ford Gets Wish: Triumphs in Her ‘Dream Role’,” The Boston Globe, 7 Oct. 1950, 14.
Ida Belle Hicks, “ ‘Moon Down’ Death Scene Gives New Life to Screen Career of Peter van Eyck,” Fort Worth Star/Telegram [Texas]k 14 June 1943, 14.
“Mr van Eyck Writes Tune Submitted for ‘Moon Is Down’,” Evening Star (Washington, DC), 3 Apr. 1943, 29.
Kenyon Lee, “Post-War Outlook is Gloomy For Screen’s Nazis,” Star Weekly (Toronto, Canada), 12 Aug. 1944, 21.
As reported by Louella O. Parsons, the Philadelphia Inquirer, 17 Aug. 1943, 13.
As reported by Louella O. Parsons, The Fresno Bee, 26 Oct. 1943, 6.
“Friends Wish Well To Actor-Soldier,” Hollywood Citizen-News, 13 Apr. 1944, 10.
Henry Bretton, A Dream, Shadows and Fulfillment. Xlibris: 2017, 23.
George Bailey, Germans: The Biography of an Obsession. New York: The Free Press, 1991 [1972], 19.
Evening Courier (Camden, NJ), 25 Jan. 1945, 8.
“Broadway,” Appeal-Democrat (Marysville CA), 14 September, 1945, 12.
Shamokin News-Dispatch, 5 Nov. 1945, 6.
Sidney Skolsky, “In Hollywood,” Times Herald (Washington DC), 10 June 1945, 40.
Hans N. Tuch, “Michael Weyl.” The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training: Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Information Series. Interviewed on June 26, 1988, 3. https://adst.org/OH%2OTOCs/Weyl,%20Michael.toc.pdf.
Letter from Peter van Eyck to Watson Webb, 4 Nov. 1948. In private hands.
Letter from Peter van Eyck to Watson Webb, 4 Nov. 1948.
Jennifer Fay, “‘That’s Jazz Made in Germany!’: Hallo, Fräulein! and the Limits of Democratic Pedagogy,” Cinema Journal 44:1, 3.
Letter from Peter van Eyck to Watson Webb, 4 Nov. 1948.
“A Movie Star Finds Acting ‘Easiest Life’,” Lexington Leader (KY), 24 Apr. 1953, 6.
“A Movie Star Finds Acting ‘Easiest Life’.”
Henry C. Alter, cited in Eric C. Rust, U-Boat Commander Oskar Kush: Anatomy of a Nazi-Era Betrayal and Judicial Murder. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press: 2020, 42.
J. V. Cottom, “Les Immortels du Cinéma: Peter van Eyck,” 19, my translation.
Tim Bergfelder, “The Passenger: Ambivalences of National Identity and Masculinity in the Star Persona of Peter van Eyck,” Take Two: Fifties Cinema in Divided Germany, ed. John E. Davidson and Sabine Hake. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007, 45.
Erskine Johnson, “Hollywood Today,” Arizona Daily Star, 15 Nov. 1954, 12.
Many Hollywood bios state that Peter died from a minor infection that turned into virulent sepsis. Inge van Eyck’s own statements about Peter’s failing health during the year preceding his death, his bouts of recurring thrombosis, and Inge’s presence at his death bed convincingly contradict this.
William Faulkner: “Mississippi Hills: My Epitaph.”
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