Native New Yorker

So I get to meet the former Esther Kellerman. She won’t want me to reveal her identity, but she’s been in many films over the last thirty years. Now in her fifties, her looks belie her years – though how much of this is cosmetic, I wouldn’t like to guess. Her mind is still sharp as a razor, and thankfully, her memory is excellent. She can recall events forty, fifty years ago with great clarity. She’s been married twice but is currently single, and enjoying a rest from filming. The scripts keep coming but she’s more selective these days, she says. Definitely no more nudity.

So you’re Krantz’s girl she says, absolutely charming. I didn’t know, it was a surprise when Saul told me.
It’s strange, I say, but if things had turned out differently, you might have been my mother.
She starts to laugh, Krantz might never have left America. Maybe we’d have been married? But its no good crying over how things might have been. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean about your parents.
I shrug. It’s okay, I’m getting over it. This is part of my therapy.
Anything I can do to help, I will. Krantz meant a lot to me. He was my first love, you know, the first boy I kissed. The first one I dated. He was really something.
Yeah, I know. He was something else.
Where do I start?
How about the beginning. That’s always a good place.

I’ll let her do the talking:

I was born in 1950, the youngest of the four Kellerman children. We lived in an apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which in those days was quite a mix of cultures. The Krantz family were our neighbours on the same block, and my brother Daniel, two years my senior, was your father’s best friend. They were pretty much inseparable as kids – neither had a natural brother, so they became like brothers. It took the war in Vietnam to split them up, but that came later.

It’s hard now to imagine now how exciting it was growing up in America in the Sixties. It was a time of change, a time when it was great to be young. In my mid teens I started dating the boy who became your father. He was a very charismatic fellow, intelligent and strong-minded.

One thing I'll never forget is the Open Poetry nights at Les Deux Megots, the coffee house on East 7th Street. The truly serious poets suffered from monotone deliveries and spewed nonsense endlessly. Krantz, on the other hand, was the one guy you could rely on to come up with something inspiring, uplifting, and different. He had a knack, a gift. The tragedy is that his poetry never found it into print.

In the June of 1967, the summer of love, Krantz decided that he wanted to drive out west and see the revolution at first hand. But when we got there he became disillusioned, and didn’t share in my enthusiasm for the hippy way of life. You have to understand that New York was his world, and he felt uncomfortable outside. How ironic that within a year he had left America for good. I didn’t see him again for twenty years.

Meanwhile Danny had been drafted into the army, and posted to Vietnam. It was an experience that left him traumatised, from which he has never fully recovered. Today he’s in a psychiatric unit in LA, where I keep an eye on him. Towards the end of the war he did meet Krantz again, in Saigon, but by then he was so far gone, it didn’t register.

I used to get news of Krantz from my mother, during our numerous long distance phone calls. I heard that he’d returned to France after Nam, gotten married to a local girl, and was living just outside Paris. About this time I’d also married for the first time, but it didn’t last. My second husband rescued me from oblivion, became my manager, and engineered my successful years in Hollywood. But these things never last in movie land, and he eventually traded me in for a younger model. So it goes.

I did get to meet Krantz one more time though. I happened to find myself on location in Paris, shooting a movie for Godard, of all people. Through press contacts I managed to locate Krantz, who was working as a freelance photographer. He was happy to meet me and catch up on what had happened to us both. I saw his photos of Sandrine, she was really pretty, much like you.

That was the last time we ever met. I cried when I heard about the accident, it was so sad. I’m really glad to have met his daughter, to know that there is something of him still alive in the world. I want us to keep in touch, to become friends, united in our memory of Krantz.