Revisionist History - A Polite Word for Liar

Episode Date: May 31, 2018

An early morning raid, a house-full of Nazis, the world’s greatest harmonica player, and a dashingly handsome undercover spy. What could possibly go wrong? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin I think I'm going to be able to play it that fast, and I actually can't. So take it from your introduction again after the three chords, a little slower. If you ever want to treat yourself to something wonderful, type in the name Adler and the word harmonica on YouTube. This is from an Australian program called Four Corners from 1961. There are a hundred videos like this. Do people take you seriously with this instrument? Oh, a nasty question. I do. Oh, I take myself so seriously.

And you take yourself seriously, but who others? Well, if Vaughan Williams writes for the mouth organ, he's not doing this for a joke. my name is Malcolm Gladwell you're listening to revisionist history my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood this is the first of two episodes about memory about the myths we hold about it and the games our memories play. This one is about an argument between two old friends over what supposedly happened or did not happen during a raid on a house supposedly full of Nazis in July 1945. Or maybe April of 1946.

I have no idea. This is an interview with Larry Adler by Dorothy Horowitz on February the 5th, 1986. And Larry Adler is the virtuoso hand organ player. Is that correct title? Did you say hand organ? Mouth organ. Because the hand organ is what you grind for monkeys. Right, you are.

By the time Larry Adler sat down to tell his life story to a historian with the American Jewish Committee, his reputation was well known. Perfectly all right with me. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Mouth organ player, or harmonica player, as it is also known. I use the word mouth organ, but the people who manufacture it call it a harmonica. And I might add a raconteur par excellence, and we hope you're going to indulge in a lot of that because

we're going to want to know all about you. Of course, you know that raconteur is a very polite word for liar. Raconteur is a very polite word for liar. That could easily be on Larry Adler's tombstone. Larry Adler was the greatest harmonica player in the world. Your grandparents would know exactly who he was. I have to admit, I'd never heard of him until I was rooting around one day in the oral history archives at the New York Public Library. I ran across his interview,

listened to it for a few moments, and was about to give up when Adler began to tell the story of his affair with Ingrid Bergman, back when she was considered the most beautiful actress in the world. They met while Adler was on tour at the end of the Second World War,

entertaining the troops in Europe. Late one night, he's in a bar in Augsburg, Germany, playing the piano. And she came into the room where I was playing, liked what I was playing, asked me what it was. I said it was something I made up. And she said, have you written it down? I said, no, I can't write music.

And she said, you're very smug, aren't you? You're not only ignorant, you're proud of your ignorance. That's how I met Ingrid Bergman. Adler tells his interviewer that he'd just recently read a biography of Bergman in which Berg tells his interviewer that he'd just recently read a biography of Bergman in which Bergman's husband claimed that he, Larry Adler, had come to him and confessed their affair. I know I wouldn't have done such a thing because I wouldn't have done that to Ingrid. I wouldn't have named what was happening to her husband. However,

it is in the book, and I can't deny that he said that to the author of the book. But as I say, I can't see me doing it. It is against my nature and my principles. Just to be clear, Larry Adler was having an affair with one of the most famous actresses in the world. And the actress's husband says Adler confessed it to him. You would think that would be a memorable event. But Adler's response is, maybe. I guess it could have happened. By the way, in War and Peace,

and I'm paraphrasing, of course, because you can't remember Tolstoy word for word, there's a sequence where a young man who's been at a battle, I think the Battle of Borodino, is in Moscow in a drawing room telling these very attractive young ladies about his war experiences. But he was behind the lines. He didn't see action. He only heard about action from other soldiers. But he saw that he was losing his audience because he couldn't give them any tales of battle action. So he began to use the stories that other soldiers

had told him, but making it personal as if he had experienced that action. And then Tolstoy has a line very much like this. And he realized as he spoke that the truth was slipping away from him, and soon he would no longer know what the truth was. Now, I think that applies very much to anybody telling any story about anything. The officer in Tolstoy's War and Peace tells a story that isn't true, and from then on, forgets that it isn't true. Larry Adler doesn't call the officer a liar, or say he shouldn't make things up.

Adler says, that's the way memories work. They're up for grabs. In fact, throughout the oral history, Adler keeps summoning memories and simultaneously discounting them, until he has completely convinced you that that's the way we all ought to act. The interview culminates in the story of the raid on the Munich boarding house full of Nazis, with his old friend, the dashingly handsome spy named Hans Werner, a.k.a. John Weitz. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Larry Adler was born in Baltimore in 1914 to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. His dad was a plumber. At the age of two, he wandered away from home and was later found at a local bar standing on top of a pool table

and singing I've Got the Profiteering Blues to wild applause. He was a prodigy. At 14, he took his harmonica on the train to New York City and talked his way into performing on Broadway. I passed the Paramount Theater and Rudy Vallee's name was on the train to New York City and talked his way into performing on Broadway. I passed the Paramount Theater and Rudy Vallee's name was on the marquee. Rudy Vallee was basically the Jay-Z of the 1920s. So I got off the streetcar, sneaked past the stage door, man, found Rudy Vallee and started to play for him.

And he interrupted me. He said, look, I'm just a master of ceremonies here, kid. I'm not an agent. Vallee put him on that very night. It was obvious even then that Adler was something special. He had perfect pitch, an astounding musical memory. He could make the harmonica sing in a way that no one else has ever done. If you watch any of those old videos of Adler on YouTube, he's mesmerizing. Slender, long, thin fingers, huge forehead, oversized eyes. There's a wonderful story about him in The New Yorker in 1942,

which describes him as resembling a very young and slightly sinister kitten. Once, when he's living in Beverly Hills, Adler gets a call from Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin says, please come over and make a fourth for tennis because Bill Tilden can't make it. Bill Tilden, arguably the greatest tennis player of all time after Roger Federer. Adler goes over. There's a woman there with badly combed hair and black sneakers and a man with a weird mustache. They hit for a while and he realizes, oh, the woman is Greta Garbo and the man with the weird mustache, Salvador Dali. Tilden, Garbo, Dali, Chaplin. This kind of thing happens to Adler all the time.

He wanted to subtitle his autobiography, Name Drops Keep Falling on My Head. He was friends with the legendary composer Frank Lesser, but he hated Lesser's wife, whom he called, wait for it, the evil of two Lessers. I mean, how much do you love this guy? Prince Philip wrote me a wonderful letter when my father died from Buckingham Palace and said, you know, how close they were. That's Peter Adler, Larry's son. Prince Philip, of course, is the Queen's husband. Well, they were both members of an infamous club called the Thursday Club. And I think there were only 13 members. And they would meet every other Thursday at Wheeler's Restaurant

and all get very drunk and tell tales and whatever they did. And we were living in Grosvenor Square at the time. And in the middle of the afternoon, my father arrives without warning, totally drunk with Prince Philip. They'd come straight from a Thursday club lunch. And the fact that my father had never given my mother any warning, he was arriving with the Duke of Edinburgh.

I don't think she forgave him. But the greatest Larry Adler story comes earlier. Adler is in Germany, entertaining the American troops. He's touring with Jack Benny, one of the most famous entertainers of the day, and Ingrid Bergman, who he's just met at the piano bar in Augsburg and is possibly already sleeping with. And the story is, Jack Benny, Ingrid Bergman and I were in Munich, July 1945, and we met this young man, John Weitz, who was the commander of an OSS unit.

John Weitz, the second old friend in this story. From the 1960s to the 1980s, John Weitz was a successful high-end men's fashion designer. He made the kind of clothes you would put in an overnight bag before jumping on the Concorde to make a lunch date at the Savoy in London. In shirts, Weitz favored what was known as the European cut, which, as a fashion critic once wrote, disqualified anyone without a perfectly flat stomach. Weitz was 6'2", insanely handsome, raced sports cars at Le Mans and Sebrin, wrote best-selling thrillers and scholarly biographies, educated in exclusive English boarding schools,

aristocratic bearing, married to a stunning actress, Susan Conner. He was basically James Bond. What was the world that your father and mother inhabited in sort of 60s and 70s New York? It was a pretty, you know, kind of beautiful people set. That's John Weitz's son, Chris. He and his brother Paul are both filmmakers in Los Angeles. There's actually, there's a book

called The Beautiful People in which my parents are featured along with the rest of their bunch. You've probably seen some of the Weitz brothers' films. About a Boy, The Exquisite In Good Company, American Pie. If you're wondering, their father was a big fan of American Pie.

And our dad really loved it. He did love it. Yeah, he did. He defended it. He defended it against all comers. So I remember him saying that he was in a coffee shop and some old guy said to him, well, sarcastically, I bet you're really proud of your kids

for making this horrible film. And he said, I don't know where he came up with this, but he said, haven't you ever masturbated in your life? John Weitz was German, born in Berlin in 1923 as Hans Werner Weitz. He was also Jewish, and of that class of wealthy, assimilated German Jews, for whom those two identities were not a contradiction. His father, Robert, had fought for Germany in the First World War and won an Iron Cross. Vacations in the north of Germany and kind of a beautiful life. Then Hitler took power. Weitz's family fled in 1938.

Then on to Shanghai, where he waited for his American visa and played rugby on the side. And finally, to America in 1941. John Weitz joins the U.S. Army and gets recruited by the legendary wartime spymaster Wild Bill Donovan into the OSS, the forerunner of today's CIA. Then he's sent back into occupied Europe as an undercover spy, because, of course, he doesn't have to pretend to be German. He's actually German. He's dropped into France, makes contact with the resistance.

He's part of the group that liberated one of the most infamous concentration camps, Dachau. He told me about a... When he was in Dachau seeing a gas chamber and there was a little window whereby the operator could tell whether the people inside were dead or not. And next to it was a picture of his little child. He described it as being the way that, you know, a taxi driver would have a picture of his family and children like taped to the dashboard.

But that really stuck with him. After the war, Dachau was turned into a holding pen for prisoners of war. Weitz was sent into the camp to spy on the captured German soldiers, to impersonate a German POW. Some German soldiers, after the war ended,

would burn off their SS tattoos with the end of a cigarette. Weitz got a tattoo and then burned himself as well, to make the impersonation real. Now you'd say he had PTSD, actually, but nobody talked about it in that way. So he was, you know, a drinker, not a sloppy one, but someone who sort of regularly, until he suddenly cut it off like cold turkey at some point in our childhood. He didn't sleep well. He woke up very early in the morning. He had incredibly regular habits born of the army, of kind of keeping things in order. He was, if he was crossed by a stranger,

if someone was rude to him or impolite, he would be very scary and dangerous. He definitely seemed, from the war, someone who had no physical fear of other people. And that was really scary as a child to watch. White told his sons that he didn't know whether he could ever be a good father. The war had changed him too much. Chris and I used to talk about our childhood as growing up behind the Iron Curtain.

You had to have surreptitious modes of self-expression and humor was a was a big aspect of that the fact that we ended up working together is partly because we sort of developed this shared sense of humor and it was kind of like a samizdat method of maintaining our autonomy with a very sort of domineering dad who was always ready for things to lapse into complete catastrophe. Yeah, yeah. A dad who was always ready for things to lapse

into catastrophe. Back to Munich. The war has just ended. Weiz is now running an undercover operation against a German guerrilla group called Werewolf. It's made up of ex-Nazi soldiers who are causing trouble across liberated Europe. A Werewolf cell had holed up in a Munich rooming house, not far from the Deutsche Theater.

John Weitz has infiltrated the group under the name Hans Werner. Then word comes in from the Allied brass. Round up the werewolf members. And just as the order is issued, Weitz runs into Larry Adler, Ingrid Bergman, and Jack Penny. And he said that they had found a house where they knew there were eight German soldiers. Now the war was over, therefore these soldiers had neither surrendered nor been captured. John and his OSS unit were going to raid them. And would Jack, Ingrid, and I like to come along? Well, Jack and Ingrid refused. They were terrified of the idea. I loved it. Now, let's just pause here while I point out the obvious. A 20-something John Weitz,

the dashingly handsome undercover spy, runs into, respectively, America's most famous actress, America's most famous comedian, and the world's greatest harmonica player, presumably at a nightclub. And he invites all three of them to join him in raiding a house full of Nazi guerrillas. And one of them, the skinny harmonica player from Baltimore, says yes. The Weitz brothers, disciples of Hollywood, do not find this as odd as I did. Does it strike you, one of the many weird things with that story is the notion that you are an OSS officer in Munich, you're going to do this bust, and you bring along a famous harmonica player? What's strange about that? Well, I guess it's a testament to the power of celebrity. It's kind of like a ride-along, you know? Like

Kevin Hart and Ice Cube. So Larry Adler prepares for his mission. I'm guessing he's lying in the arms of the world's most beautiful actress. He gets up, puts on a helmet, and goes off to capture some Nazis. So I met these OSS men at 4.30 in the morning. We got into a jeep, went to this house, and according to John, the OSS men burst into the house, two of the Germans fired back at them and were killed. The other six were captured. Key phrase, according

to John. John Weitz remembers a gunfight, but Adler remembers something completely different. My story is when we got into the house, there were two old ladies. There was no firing. No one was hurt in any way. And so there are these two diametrically opposed stories by two people who were there. In John White's memory, a house full of Nazis, a nasty battle, death, drama. In Larry Adler's memory, of the same night, nothing. No Nazis, no gunfight, no one dies. They burst in, and all they find is a room full of harmless old women,

presumably knitting. But wait, there's another version. Same characters, same setup, only it's supposed to take place almost a year later in April of 1946. I told this story to a group of publishers in London when I made a speech and one of the publishers told me afterwards, Mr. Adler, did you know that the raid you're talking about is mentioned in another book? And John Weitz is mentioned, but not by name. He's called Werner because that was his name as an agent to infiltrate the German lines. John, under the name of Werner, is leading the raid. You are with him. And now there are 18 Nazi soldiers. The house is surrounded by armored carriers and floodlights.

And I still remember two old ladies. So the question is, who is right? Exactly. Who's right? For the rest of their days, Adler and Weitz will argue about it. I remember Larry bringing up the story to Needle Dad. And my dad, the funny thing is, my father could be very, very forbidding and peremptory with people who sort of crossed him.

For some reason, he had a soft spot for Larry. Everyone had a soft spot for Larry. Everyone had a soft spot for Larry. What I heard at lunch was, you were rounding up these Nazis and all I saw was old women. Oh Larry! Shut up and have another champagne. There's a very specific idea about memory embedded in the story Larry Adler tells from War and Peace. The story about the soldier entertaining a group of young ladies in Moscow

and the Battle of Borodino. The officer wants to impress the people around him, so he moves himself to the front lines, and once he makes that improvement on the truth in the service of his own ego, what actually happens slips away. He becomes the victim of his own self-deception. That's the theory Adler believed in. He tells another story about the time he was in Newfoundland during the war, entertaining troops. He needs to get back to Gander Airport because he has a nightclub appearance scheduled in New York. He finds an airman who has a cargo plane, which is going to be towing a glider. And he says to Adler,

you can ride in the glider. I was in the glider. The captain was in the front plane, and how exciting it was for me being in the glider, being towed, and how the most exciting part came when we were over Gander Airport, and he cut the glider loose by a release mechanism, and we floated down in this heavenly feeling I had of escape, that I never wanted to land.

Adler tells that story for years. Well, my daughter found a diary. It covered my trip to Newfoundland. I wasn't in the glider. I was in the front plane. Now, you see how that took over. It's a better story being in the glider. It makes, if you say to somebody, I was in the first front plane, but we were towing a glider, that's no story. But if you say, I was in the glider, and that was very exciting, that's more of a story. So that after a while, the wish to be in the glider took over and became fact and put me in the glider. And the truth is that I've never been in a glider in my life. That's what I mean by self-deception.

Adler knew he had a big ego, and he simply assumed that his ego was out in the world, rewriting history on his behalf. Which seems to make sense. Adler is the compulsive storyteller, right? The name-dropper. In his New Yorker profile, there's this line, the most casual request for information from a newspaper reporter or

interviewer will often bring in reply a 12 or 15 typewritten single-spaced narrative composed and typed by Larry in person and containing dialogue and anecdotes. I think that whenever we run across someone telling a false story, we assume that this is what's happening, that the lie is driven by ego. In the next episode, I'm going to talk about an incident that you'll almost certainly remember, a modern version of Adler's glider story. Somebody famous was caught saying, in effect, that they were in the glider when they were actually in the plane pulling the glider. And the overwhelming assumption was that the storyteller changed the details of what happened because he wanted to look better, braver, bolder.

But here's my question. Why do we always have to frame memory disagreements and errors in terms of character? Why do we always need a culprit? Because I'm not sure Adler can be explained away as an egotist. There were all kinds of ways in which he was anything but. At what point, I know life became somewhat complicated here. Adler was part of a group that went to Washington in the middle of the McCarthy era to protest the anti-communist hysteria sweeping through Hollywood.

Then he got accused of being a communist. He went bankrupt fighting McCarthyism. At the height of his career, he was blacklisted, lost everything. Then Roy Cohen, who was McCarthy's advisor, offered me a deal. He had arranged that I would give testimony secretly before the McCarthy Internal Security Committee. And he said, what we're going to do is I've prepared a list of names for you. All of these people have been named by others. They've already been named. We know their names. You just read their names off and you're not hurting anybody.

In the middle of a national hysteria, one that would end up ruining countless lives, Adler is offered a get-out-of-jail-free card. He won't take it. And I said, Mr. Kahn, what the hell is the sense of me reading a list of names that you already know? So he looked out of the window and he spread his hands and he says, go fight Sidney Hall. We're all trying to get you back to work, Larry, and you're not helping us. So that was that. I wouldn't have given the name of an enemy. I just am against the principle of the informer. I always have been. I still am. Adler ended up moving his whole family to London.

He gave up their house in Beverly Hills, the beach house in Malibu, the tennis matches with the stars. started over. Chris White says his father liked Adler not just because of his musical genius or his hilarious stories, but because he had, and I'm quoting, a major set of balls. Here's Peter Adler again. He would really take huge risks on principle. He was a very, very principled man. And I remember him doing it, which terrified me. He did a public reading of the satanic verses with various other artists

at the time that Salman Rushdie had the fatwa put on him, you know, simply to protest against this kind of nonsense. And he would do a lot of things like that. And he wasn't doing it for publicity. He's doing it because he really cared about it. So maybe when the young John Weitz asks Larry Adler if he wants to do a ride-along on that raid in Munich, it's not a lark. Maybe he's serious. And maybe Adler volunteered because it was important. Remember, he's a Jew. In Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi party. If it's all a lark, then the grandmother version is funny.

It's the kind of punchline you can imagine landing well at a Hollywood dinner party. Larry Adler, the compulsive storyteller, wins over another crowd. But if he's serious about the raid, then the grandmothers aren't funny. They're not a punchline. They're a sad and awkward ending. My story is duller. One would never even tell such a story.

And I would tell it only because that is my memory of it. He's right. But then consider his companion. John Weitz would go on to write many books, among them Friends in High Places, a thriller with a really complicated core. The main character was somebody who was in the auto industry and was joining the Nazi party in order to get ahead in his career. I think he felt about himself that if he hadn't been Jewish,

maybe there but for the grace of God, would go his moral center. When John Weitz turned to writing serious historical biographies, his subjects were Germans from the same class he had come from, wealthy, cosmopolitan, intellectuals, who ended up serving Hitler. You don't have to be a psychoanalyst to make sense of these stories. They're Weitz's attempt to sort through the conflict

between his love of his native Germany and his devastation about what his Germany had done. It's a long ago. Now I know, but tell me. Well, I was young, and I could wear all sorts of clothes and make them look real. In 1997, Weitz went on the Charlie Rose show. He and Rose talked happily about Weitz's new biography,

until Rose started to ask Weitz about Weitz's own experience during the war. Did you go into Germany? I was in Germany, yes. Yeah, when? After... I'm going to pull this out of you, John. The journalist. Yes. Weitz doesn't want to talk about it. I started in France during the general time of the invasion plans. Plans? Yes. Did they drop you by parachute into the... No, no, no. Oh, never. How'd you get in there? You have many ways of being delivered, but not by parachute, because they can see you coming. Okay, so how'd you get in? Oh, you can go in by boat. How did

you get in? By small plane. How did you get in? Well, by my small airplane. Small airplane that landed? Well, there were many beaches. Okay, so the small plane landed on a beach. You fly. You know, the dead stake is... This goes on and on. How many trips did you make in and out of France? Ten? Oh, God, no, no, no. Less or more?

Oh, much less. More than one, less than four. How's that? Oh, Lord, you More than one, less than four. How's that? Oh, Lord. You're being a journalist. Finally, Rose just gets exasperated. Tell me why you're so at this late stage. What is the code that keeps you from being more forthcoming?

Well, General Donovan issued a memorandum. Wow, Bill Donovan. Yes, our boss. Head of OSS. Donovan issued a memorandum. Wow, Bill Donovan. Yes. Our boss. Head of OSS. Which said, for as long as there are people alive, I spoke to one the day before yesterday on the phone, an 89-year-old ex-colonel of Panzers, of Armored Forces, 9th Cross wearer, who was a resistance officer.

As long as there are people alive, you'd be amazed at how many Germans, stupid ones, would still be angry at somebody who brought some form of resistance. This is 1997. The war has been over for more than half a century, and Weitz refuses to give anything more than the barest details of his experience because of a memo written by his former boss, who, by the way, has been dead for decades. Weitz and Adler are principled men. It's just that their principles take different forms.

On matters of emotional significance, one man shrouds his memories in a blanket of chatter and whimsy. The other falls silent and retreats. When we encounter conflicts in memory, we want to label one party as a liar. We want to make a judgment. This strategy is authentic. This strategy is dubious. Adler is the egotistical one. Weitz is the evasive one. But why? Why can't we just accept that all of us deal with the uncertainty of our experiences in different ways? Memory does not reveal character. That's our mistake. In the early 1990s, John Weitz talked to a historian named Perry Biddescombe,

who was working on a book about the werewolf movement. Biddescombe found Weitz's name in the phone book and called him out of the blue. This time, Weitz told yet another version of the raid. In this version, there was no shooting, no resistance, no one died. The members of Werewolf were all punks, too young to have fought in the war, full of false bravado. Weitz and his team of allied soldiers surrounded the housing complex where the Werewolf lived and arrested them. Then, and I'm quoting now from Biddescombe's notes, the scene was invaded by forlorn mothers and grandmothers, each insisting that her lad was really a good boy

and could not possibly be mixed up in this werewolf nastiness. Do you see what Weitz did? He took his version and combined it with Larry Adler's version. There were arrests and there were grandmothers. I have no idea whether it was conscious or not, but at the end of his life, Weitz decided that friendship was more important than

memory. He decided not to be a memory fundamentalist. Larry Adler, for his part, gave his last concert in May of 2001 at the Royal Albert Hall. It was Prince Philip's 80th birthday celebration, and the Duke wanted his old friend to play for him.

Adler was near the end. His son Peter knew he wasn't well. He was ill. He was in hospital. And he, much to my horror, had himself checked out. And he was wheeled onto the stage at the Royal Albert Hall by a nurse in a wheelchair. If the past is hazy and uncertain, then all you have is the present. That's what propelled Larry Adler. To seek his fortune on Broadway as a kid, to give the harmonica its due,

to risk it all fighting McCarthy, to leave Ingrid Bergman in the early morning hours to go round up some Nazis. Even at the very end of his life, he wasn't going to stay in the hospital, was he? He privileged experiences over memories. And he played the harmonica from the wheelchair and blew every other artist off the stage. And he was wheeled off to a standing ovation. He was looking straight into camera, and I'm sure at me,

going, you do not tell me what to do. And he died a few days later. I checked. He actually died two and a half months later. Somewhere, Larry Adler is laughing. Revisionist History is a Panoply production. The senior producer is Mia Lobel, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flan Williams is our engineer. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson.

Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. I tell a story about getting to Israel just after the Six-Day War. Special service officer met me at the airport. I even remember his name, Major Zafrir, and he told me that an Israeli soldier had written a song, Sharm el-Sheikh. So I learned it, and it was a damn good tune. I played it first at El Arish in the Sinai, and there were about 200 tanks, about 2,000,

so General Rabin, who was then Chief of Staff, he was there. I played, and the audience went mad. The applause went on and on. I played it again. It made me play it six times, and I then said, my friends, I haven't got the vocabulary to describe the emotional experience of this moment. I'll never forget it, but there are other artists who've come down to the Sinai. They're waiting to to entertain you i don't want to hold up the show please don't ask me to play sharm el sheikh again and an israeli soldier calls out you'll play it till you get it right now isn't that a great story but of course it's not true it's an opera story this is the tenor singing paliaci yeah now all the details that i told you major safrir the sh, the Sharm el-Sheikh, playing it at El Arish, that's all true.

But believe me, I only played it once. However, twisting that opera story around makes it a much better story. I agree.