A Polite Word for Liar

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:27
Speaker 2: I always flatter myself. I think I'm going to be able to play it that fast, and I actually can. So take it from your introduction again after the three chords a little slower.

00:00:42
Speaker 3: 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 nineteen sixty one. There are a hundred videos like this.

00:00:56
Speaker 2: Do people take it seriously with this instrument? Well, nasty question.

00:01:00
Speaker 1: I do.

00:01:01
Speaker 4: Oh, I take myself so seriously.

00:01:02
Speaker 2: I do take it.

00:01:04
Speaker 1: You haven't.

00:01:04
Speaker 5: Well.

00:01:05
Speaker 2: If Vowan Williams writes for the mouth Ogan, he's not doing this for a joke.

00:01:18
Speaker 3: 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 are Memories Playing. 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 nineteen forty five, or maybe April of nineteen forty six.

00:01:51
Speaker 1: I have no idea.

00:01:56
Speaker 5: This is an interview with Larry Adlard by Dorothy Horowitz on February the fifth, nineteen eighty six. And Harry Adler is the virtuo so hand organ player? Is that correct title? Did you say hand organ mouth Oregon?

00:02:23
Speaker 2: Because the hand organs which you've grown from mongy.

00:02:26
Speaker 3: 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.

00:02:33
Speaker 2: Perfectly all right with me? No no, no, no, no no.

00:02:35
Speaker 5: No mouth Oregon player or harmonica player.

00:02:40
Speaker 2: I use the word mouth organ, but the people who manufacture it could harmony.

00:02:46
Speaker 5: And I might add a raccont tour 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.

00:02:56
Speaker 2: Of course, you know that raconteur is a very polite word for liar.

00:03:01
Speaker 3: 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 Bergmann, 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.

00:03:51
Speaker 2: And she came into the room where I was playing, like when 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 he said, you're very smugging't you. You're not only ignorant, you're proud of your ignorance. How I'm at Ingrid Bergmann.

00:04:11
Speaker 3: Adler tells his interviewer that he'd just recently read a biography of Bergmann in which Bergmann's husband claimed that he Larry Adler had come to him and confessed their affair.

00:04:21
Speaker 2: I know I wouldn't have done such a thing, because I wouldn't have done that to England. I wouldn't have named what would 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.

00:04:41
Speaker 3: 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.

00:05:00
Speaker 2: War in peace and I'm paraphrasing, of course, because you can't remember tolstoy word for would. There's a sequence where a young man who's been at a 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 story 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.

00:05:54
Speaker 3: 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 aka John Whites. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Larry Adler was born in Baltimore in nineteen fourteen 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.

00:07:04
Speaker 6: He was a prodigy.

00:07:07
Speaker 3: At fourteen, he took his harmone on the train to New York City and talked his way into performing on Broadway.

00:07:13
Speaker 2: I passed the Paramount Theater and Rudey Valet's name was on the marquee.

00:07:17
Speaker 3: Rudy Valley was basically the jay Z of the nineteen twenties.

00:07:21
Speaker 2: So I got off the streetcar, sneak past the stage door man found Rudy Valley and started to play for him, and he interrupted, I mean, look, I'm just a master of ceremonies, your kid, I'm not an agent.

00:07:33
Speaker 3: Valley 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 nineteen forty two, 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 argued with 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 Salvado'dlly Tilden, Garbo, Dolly Chaplain. 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?

00:09:02
Speaker 7: Prince Philip wrote me a wonderful letter when my father died from Buckingham Palace and said, you know how close they were.

00:09:09
Speaker 3: That's Peter Adler, Larry's son. Prince Philip, of course is the Queen's husband.

00:09:14
Speaker 7: Well, they were both members of an infamous club called the Thursday Club, and I think there were only thirteen 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's 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 you forgave him.

00:09:53
Speaker 3: 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 Bergmann, who has just met at the Piano Bar in Augsburg and is possibly already sleeping.

00:10:09
Speaker 2: With And the story is Jack Benny Ingrid Bergman and I were in Munich July nineteen forty five and we met this young man, John Whites, who is the commander of an OSS unit.

00:10:27
Speaker 3: John Whites the second old friend in this story. From the nineteen sixties to the nineteen eighties, John Whites was a successful high end men's fashion designer. He made the kind of clothes he would put it in an overnight bag before jumping on the concord to make a lunch date at the Savoy in London. In shirts. White's favored what was known as the European cut, which, as a fashion critic once wrote, disqualified anyone without a perfectly flat stomach. Whites was six foot two, insanely handsome, raced sports cars at Lahmann and Sebron, wrote best selling thrillers and scholarly biographies. Educated in exclusive English boarding schools, aristocratic bearing, married to a stunning actress, Susan Kohner. He was basically James Bond.

00:11:16
Speaker 4: What was the world that your father was?

00:11:21
Speaker 3: Father and mother inhabited in sort of sixties and seventies New York.

00:11:25
Speaker 6: I was a pretty, you know, kind of beautiful people set.

00:11:31
Speaker 3: That's John White's son Chris. He and his brother Paul are both filmmakers in Los Angeles.

00:11:36
Speaker 6: There's actually there's a book called The Beautiful People in which.

00:11:38
Speaker 8: My parents are featured, along with the rest of their bunch.

00:11:42
Speaker 3: You've probably seen some of the Whites 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.

00:11:53
Speaker 6: But our dad really loved it.

00:11:56
Speaker 9: Yeah, he defends you know.

00:12:00
Speaker 2: So.

00:12:01
Speaker 6: I remember him.

00:12:01
Speaker 10: Saying that he was in a coffee shop and some old guy said to him, well, sarcastic, I bet you really proud of your kids for making this horrible film, And he's I don't know where he came up with this, but he said, haven't you ever masturbated in your life?

00:12:20
Speaker 3: John Whites was German born in Berlin in nineteen twenty three as Hans Werner Whitz. 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.

00:12:39
Speaker 6: Vacations in the north of Germany and kind of a beautiful life.

00:12:45
Speaker 3: Then Hitler took power. Whites's family fled in nineteen thirty eight, then onto Shanghai where he waited for his American visa and played rugby on the side, and finally to America. In nineteen forty one, John Whites joins the US Army and gets recruited by the legendary wartime spymaster while Bill Donovan into the USS, the forerunner of today's CIA. Then he sent too 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, Daco.

00:13:25
Speaker 8: He told me about when he was in Dachause 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.

00:13:41
Speaker 6: Picture of his little child. He described it as being the way that a taxi driver would have a picture of his family and children like taped to the dashboard, but that really stuck with them.

00:13:57
Speaker 3: After the war, Daca was turned into a holding pen for prisoners of war. Whites 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. Whites got a tattoo and then burned himself as well to make the impersonation real.

00:14:21
Speaker 6: 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.

00:15:13
Speaker 3: 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.

00:15:21
Speaker 9: Chris and I used to talk about our childhood as growing up in a behind the iron curtain. I think you had to have sort of surreptitious modes of self expression, and humor was a big aspect of that.

00:15:36
Speaker 11: 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 Yeah.

00:15:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, a dad who was always ready for things to lapse into catastrophe. Back to Munich, the war has just ended. Whites 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 Whites has infiltrated the group under the name Hans Werner. Then work comes in from the Allied Brass round up the Werewolf members, And just as the order is issued, Whites runs into Larry Adler, Ingrid Bergmann, and Jack Penny.

00:16:43
Speaker 2: And he said that they had found the 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?

00:17:01
Speaker 6: Well?

00:17:01
Speaker 2: Jack and Ingrid refused that were terrified of the idea. I loved it.

00:17:06
Speaker 3: Now let's just pause here while I point not the obvious. A twenty something John White's 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 gorillas, and one of them, the skinny harmonica player from Baltimore, says, yes, the Whites Brothers disciples of Hollywood, do not find this as odd as I did?

00:17:40
Speaker 4: 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 bus and you bring along a famous harmonica player.

00:17:54
Speaker 11: What's strange about that.

00:17:57
Speaker 9: I guess it's a testament of the power of celebrity.

00:18:00
Speaker 11: It was kind of like a ride along, you.

00:18:01
Speaker 8: Know, like Kevin Hart and ICEQ.

00:18:08
Speaker 3: So Larry Adler 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.

00:18:19
Speaker 2: So I met these oss men at four thirty 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 Kifrais.

00:18:34
Speaker 3: According to John, John Whitez remembers a gunfight, but Adler remembers something completely different.

00:18:42
Speaker 2: 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 my two people who were there.

00:18:57
Speaker 3: In John Whitez's memory, a house full of Nazis a nasty battle, death drama. In Larryadler'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 nineteen forty six.

00:19:28
Speaker 2: I told this story to a group of publishers in London when I made a speech, and one of the publishers told me, after, what, mister Bradler, did you know that the raid you're talking about is mentioned in another book? And John Whites is mentioned, but not by name. He's called Werner because that was his name as an agent to infiltrate the German lions. John under the name of Werner is leading the raid. You are with him, and now there are eighteen 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?

00:20:08
Speaker 1: Exactly who's right?

00:20:10
Speaker 3: For the rest of their days, Adler and Whites will argue about it.

00:20:14
Speaker 9: I remember Larry bringing up the story to Needle Dad and my dad.

00:20:22
Speaker 6: The funny thing is my father could be very very forbidding and peremptory with people who sort of crossed him.

00:20:28
Speaker 8: For some reason.

00:20:29
Speaker 6: He had a soft spot for Larry.

00:20:33
Speaker 3: Everyone had a sou spot for Larry.

00:20:38
Speaker 9: What I heard at lunch was you were rounding up these Nazis, and all I saw was old women. Oh Larry, you some shut up and have another champagne.

00:21:02
Speaker 3: 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 is a cargo plane which is going to be towing a glider, and he says to Adler, you can ride in the glider.

00:21:53
Speaker 2: I was in the glider, the captain was in the front plane. And how exciting it was for me being in the glidder 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 his escape that I never wanted the land.

00:22:12
Speaker 3: Adler tells that story for years.

00:22:15
Speaker 2: 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 it if you say to somebody, I was in the first front plane, but we were towing a glider, that's no story. 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 fat 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.

00:22:54
Speaker 3: 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 twelve or fifteen typewritten single space 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 instant 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 the way as an egotist. There were all kinds of ways in which he was anything.

00:24:18
Speaker 5: But at what point, I know, life became somewhat complicated here.

00:24:26
Speaker 3: 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.

00:24:44
Speaker 2: Then Roy Cohn, 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. Who just read their names off, and you're not hurting anybody.

00:25:11
Speaker 3: 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.

00:25:21
Speaker 2: Nice of mister con What the hell's 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 City Hall. We're all trying to get you back to work later 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.

00:25:44
Speaker 3: 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.

00:26:08
Speaker 7: He would really chake 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 de fatois 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.

00:26:41
Speaker 3: So maybe when the young John Whites asks Larry Adler if he wants to do a ride along on that rate of 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.

00:27:22
Speaker 2: My story is duller. One would not never even tell such a story, And I would tell it only because that is my memory of it.

00:27:32
Speaker 3: He's right, But then consider his companion, John Whites, would go on to write many books, among them Friends in High Places, a thriller with a really complicated core.

00:27:45
Speaker 9: 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.

00:27:52
Speaker 12: I think he.

00:27:54
Speaker 9: Felt about himself that he hadn't in Jewish. Maybe there, but for the grace of God would go his moral center.

00:28:04
Speaker 3: When John Whites 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. There are Whites's attempt to sort through the conflict between his love of his native Germany and his devastation about what his Germany had done.

00:28:32
Speaker 12: It's long ago, now, I know, But well, I was young and I could wear all sorts of clothes and make them look real.

00:28:39
Speaker 3: In nineteen ninety seven, Whites went on the Charlie Rose Show. He and Rose talked happily about White's new biography until Rose started to ask Whites about White's own experience during the war.

00:28:52
Speaker 12: Did you go into Germany? I was in Germany when after I want to pull this out of you. John the journalist.

00:29:00
Speaker 3: Yes, Whites doesn't want to talk about it.

00:29:03
Speaker 12: I started in France during the general time of the invasion. Plans plans, yes, the parachute into No, no, oh never.

00:29:14
Speaker 1: How did you get in it?

00:29:15
Speaker 12: You have many ways of being delivered, but not by parachute because they can see you coming.

00:29:19
Speaker 1: So how'd you get in?

00:29:21
Speaker 12: You can go in by both.

00:29:22
Speaker 1: Did you get by a small plane? How did you get in?

00:29:25
Speaker 12: Well, by by my small airplane.

00:29:28
Speaker 1: Small airplane, small landed.

00:29:30
Speaker 12: There were many beaches, small plane landed on the fly, you know the dead.

00:29:37
Speaker 3: This goes on and on.

00:29:39
Speaker 1: How many trips did you make in and out of France? Ten?

00:29:48
Speaker 12: No, no, no, lesser more, oh much, less less.

00:29:52
Speaker 1: Than one, less than four being the journalist all right.

00:29:56
Speaker 3: Finally Rose just gets exasperated.

00:29:59
Speaker 1: Tell me why you're so at this late stage? What is the what is the code that keeps you from being more forthcoming?

00:30:08
Speaker 6: Well?

00:30:08
Speaker 12: General Donovan issued a MEMORIZLEL. Donovan, Yes, our boss, head of a lesson, which.

00:30:14
Speaker 1: Said, for as.

00:30:15
Speaker 12: Long as there are people alive. I spoke to one a day before yesterday on the phone, an eighty nine year old ex colonel of panzas of Armored Forces Knight crosswearer who was a resistance officer. As long as there are people alive, you'd be amazed that how many Germans, stupid ones would still be angry at somebody who brought some form of resistance.

00:30:46
Speaker 3: This is nineteen ninety seven, the war has been over for more than half a century, and Whites 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. Whites and Adler are principled men. It's just that their principles take different 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 and 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, Whites 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 nineteen nineties, John Whites talked to a historian named Perry Biddiscombe, who was working on a book about the werewolf movement. Biddiscomb found White's name in the phone book and called him out of the blue. This time, Whites 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. Whites and his team of Allied soldiers surrounded the housing complex where the Werewolf lived and arrested them. Then, and I'm quoting now from Bidiscombe'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 Whites did? He took his version and combined it with Larry Adler's version. There were arrests, and they were grandmothers. I've no idea whether it was conscious or not, but at the end of his life, Whites decided that friendship was more important than memory. He decided not to be a memory fundamentalist Larry Adler, for his heart, gave his last concert in May of two thousand and one at the Royal Albert Hall. It was Prince Philip's eightieth 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.

00:33:35
Speaker 7: Now 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 Hole by a nurse in a wheelchair.

00:33:48
Speaker 3: If the past is hazy and uncertain, then all you have is a present. That's what propelled Larry Adler to seek his fortune on Broadway as a kid, to give the harmonica. It's 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.

00:34:20
Speaker 7: He played the harmonica from the wheelchair and blew every other ushist off the stage, and he was wheeled off to a standing ovation and he was looking straight into Cameron. I'm sure at me going, you do not tell me what to do and died a few days later.

00:34:37
Speaker 3: 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. Flann Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Kerra. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

00:35:24
Speaker 2: I tell a story about getting to these to Israel. Just after the Sixth Day War. Special service officer met me at the airport. I even remember his name, Major Zaffreer, and he told me that an Israeli soldier had written the song char milshaff So I learned it was damn good tune. I played at first at Larish in the Sinai and there were about two hundred tangs, about two thousand sols. General Rabin, who was then Chief of Staff, he was there. I played and the audience went mad. The opplause 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 forge get it. But there are other artists who have come down to the Sinai. They're waiting to entertain you. I don't hold up the show. Please don't ask me to play Charmel Shak again. And it 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 the tenor singing Pollianchi. Now all the details that I told you, Major Solfrier, the Charmel shaf playing it at l reach, 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,