OTTO ROEPER

I was excited by the offer to visit Otto Roeper. Dr. Kline was writing his biography, and I was to go along. It occurred to me that it was because I was typing the manuscript, and it wouldn’t hurt if I had some personal experience with Roeper. Perhaps I should have taken offense, but I had been working with Dr. Kline for seven months, and I knew that if the book was to be completed, he needed all my help.

This was Dr. Kline’s eighth book. We have a little club, Kline’s Ghosts, we call ourselves. There are eleven of us. Kline went through three assistants on the first book, and two on the second, before he figured out how to keep us happy, at least until the book was done. I don’t know if all books get written like Dr. Kline’s, but it’s a shoddy business if they do. He thinks he does all the research and writing, while we type and catch those “pesky goblin droppings,” his words. Actually his research is slipshod at best, and his writing is pedantic. His agent hated the first draft of his first book. It went through several incarnations. Finally, he was forced to give free rein to his third assistant. The agent liked it; the book sold well; and the system was established.

This was Dr. Kline’s fifth visit to Roeper. “I have always written about the dead. This time my man is alive, it’s marvelous.”

Dr. Kline rented a car for the occasion, and drove the hundred and twenty miles, chatting the entire way. “Did I tell you what Otto said to Pound? He knew him before the war. . . .” He had told me the story many times. If true, it was demeaning to both Roeper and Pound, and it showed Dr. Kline to be quite insensitive. But, it was apocryphal: Pound and Roeper were living on separate continents at the time, and never knew each other. “Otto loved Hollywood. . . .Errol Flynn was a friend. . . .He had affairs with. . . . I can’t wait to get to that section. What a character. ”

I knew “that section” would be a difficult time for me.

When he was twenty he went to New York. I have read that he sought out the advice of successful artists and gallery owners. He may have—Dr. Kline thinks that Roeper’s success was due in large part to people thinking that he had taken their advice—but I don’t think he ever followed a word of it. Look at his work. It has a direction that he discovered in his twenties, and although his work changed through his long career, it has continuity. He never strayed from his path.

When Otto Roeper was thirty, he was the favorite of the art world. He had shows; he was interviewed; and, he was consulted. He hadn’t asked for any of the attention. He was a painter, no more and no less, and painting was his life.

Critics mused at his ever changing palette, however. They saw in his work a mirror to society’s dynamics: the coming of age of our culture. They wrote about his keen insight and his “modern synthesis.” While other art movements were dependent on individual charisma, he removed the “chaff” and, revealing the truth, combined the “emergent integrants” as a reflection of. . . .

As far as I can tell, Otto Roeper only wanted to paint. He may have accepted the accolades of society’s patrons, but he had never asked for them. Everyone came to him, artists, students, actors, politicians, and the wealthy. He was the Delphic fount. They took back koans of hidden knowledge. He never told them that only he held the key to their understanding. In a letter to his dealer he once said that “if they are silly enough to seek me out, and gullible enough to believe me, then why shouldn’t I have had a little fun?”

He continued to paint. His work sold for a lot of money, and it always sold. His friends saw him making a fortune and assumed that was his motivation. I think he would have painted for nothing.

“. . .His house is always crowded. It’s exciting being there. To be so close to Roeper. Well, you’ll feel it.” Kline hummed when he wasn’t talking.

The house wasn’t crowded, but there were a several people there besides us. Roeper sat in a wheel chair by the window in his studio. The room was shrouded in the stale odor of old age and medicine. It was hot. A nurse hovered around, checking and poking him every few minutes.

“His wife died ten years ago.” Dr. Kline whispered in my ear, as the nurse finished taking Roeper’s blood pressure and writing it down in her journal. “He has a live-in nursing staff, as well as his secretary, who manages the estate.”

At ninety-one all Otto Roeper could do was sit. His hands shook too much to allow him to work, and he had a cataract in his right eye. David Feller, his secretary, held forth at a table in the corner; with a rear-projection slide cabinet behind him, his talk sounded like a tour guide’s set piece.

Dr. Kline sat with the others, taking notes, and asking questions. Occasionally the secretary would leave the room, to return with some book or diary from Roeper’s library. They took a break at noon.

“Isn’t this great. I’ve scheduled another visit next month. Of course you’ll come. It’sgood to really know your subject.”

Roeper ignored everyone in the room. I thought that he perhaps suffered from a dementia—he reminded me of my father just before he died—and didn’t know we were all there. The discussion in the corner was too unreal, and I knew I’d hear about it from Dr. Kline. I moved my chair next to Roeper’s.

“He’ll like it if you talk to him,” the nurse said as she tucked his blanket tighter around his legs. “He’s actually quite interesting.”

“Mr. Roeper? How are you sir?”

He fixed me with his good eye. “It’s Otto,” he whispered. “Not sir.”

We talked for two hours, uninterrupted by the others.

“I’m getting tired.” He held out his shaky hand. I took it. “Thank you for talking with me.”

The drive home was difficult. Dr. Kline was excited about his next chapter. He was the darling of the day, they all knew about his book, “Of course, I didn’t bring it up myself.”

While he talked about Roeper, his paintings, and the book, I ignored him. I wondered why he didn’t know about Roeper’s pain and frustration, the sheer terror, at being unable to paint. Captive to that wheel chair by the window.

“. . . I like visiting the old man,” Kline droned on. “It’s intellectually invigorating . . . .”

It took a year to finish the biography. There was quite a celebration when the book was published. Roeper’s secretary was there, basking in reflected glory. He had quit working for Roeper shortly after our first visit, to collaborate on the biography. He and Dr. Kline have decided to work on another book.

I haven’t seen Dr. Kline since then. There are now twelve members of Ghosts. I never told him, but after that first visit, I saw Otto Roeper every weekend, until his death last month.