Безумия от Эриха - выпуск очередной)
"Throughout his career, Stroheim offered several versions of his past. In 1919, he told an interviewer, "My father was a count, and my mother, before she married him, was a baroness and lady-in-waiting to the late Empress Elizabeth."
"Then you are a count?" [asked the interviewer.]
..."A 'no-count' is more like it," he replied modestly. "Titles are not worth a pfennig in Austria. In any case," he added, "I've been an American citizen too long to care for such baubles."
He repeated this thought in another interview a few months later:
"Titles mean nothing. I gave up mine for I am an American citizen."
(Actually, he did not become an American citizen until 1926.)
This explanation of his background was a bit more fanciful than later ones. After a while, he dropped the count business and transformed his father into a colonel in the Sixth Regiment of the Dragoons; his mother, however, remained a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth. In another, more modest, recollection, he averred that his father was Hans Stroheim, a civil servant. In still another, his father was a commanding officer. Although the rank of the father and the status of the mother varied-she was not always a lady-in-waiting-the Stroheim family was always highly connected."
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