Chapter Three

Adolph Seeger and his brother Carl, who were chefs, left Vienna two weeks after the Russians pulled out and headed for the brighter lights, at that time, of London. They worked hard and diligently and in the early Sixties secured a failing greengrocer’s shop in the then exploding Kings Road and turned it into a thriving and fashionable restaurant, serving Viennese and German specialities, which they called ‘The Mayerling Hütte’. Everything from the Sacher Torte to the gherkins, the waiters and the waitresses, was imported from their home city. For a reasonable sum you could drink your steins of beer, sup your bohnensuppe, and savour your smoked eel beneath vast murals of Rudolph and Maria entwined in amorous delight, or rocky peaks staccato with dark fir trees, laced with racing torrents. There was zither music and candles, stags’ heads and pine benches carved all about with broken hearts. The waiters were blond and personable, flapping about in lederhosen, the waitresses comely, smiling, with plaited hair, swirling about in dirndls with foaming jugs of beer. The Seegers made a modest fortune. But by the end of the Seventies knew that a change was needed. The folksy-zither had become a deathly cliché, the lederhosen shiny with sweat and wear, the dirndls definitely dated. To this end they stripped out the murals, stags’ heads, and pine-cone candlesticks, dressed the staff in black satin and white shirts, covered the walls in plastic tortoise-shell, illuminated the room with coloured spotlights and built a minute glass podium, lit from below, at the far end of the room on which from midnight until one, every night, a small figure in a shabby black dress, hair cropped short and held in place by a cheap plastic slide in the shape of an airplane, sang old Zarah Leander songs from a Berlin long since pounded to dust.

Leni Minx was an instant success. The small, husky, bitter little voice, often uneven and unsure, commanded strange attention, and produced a deep nostalgia even in the breasts of those who had never been further East in their lives than Felixstowe. No one ate while Leni sang, and indeed some silently wept and carved small swastikas into the soft wood of the bar. The Mayerling Hütte swung back to popularity, and Adolph Seeger blessed the night that he went into a cheap bar off the Kurfürstendamm for a late bowl of soup and found his ‘star’ singing, literally, for her supper to a noisy and inattentive audience who had heard this kind of thing long before; and done better. But the Kings Road, he reckoned, hadn’t yet become over-familiar with the world of Isherwood and Grosz; she was an amateur, and the English liked amateurs far more than professionals; she was also cheap. Three days later, in the same black dress, she arrived with him in London where he gave her a small advance, which she considered a fortune, and bought her a rabbit-skin jacket at a C & A sale, covered her face with a thick white make-up worn by the No dancers of Japan, and carted her off to Bender’s Studios in Covent Garden for a photographic session, buying every known recording of songs from pre-war Berlin and a record-player which he insisted she listen to day and night.