Its components: politically praiseworthy, morally open to argument, professionally successful if only in sales.
‘With all this in mind there was only one thing anyone could do – open a restaurant!’
That is exactly what he did, and he did it on his own, Susi having left him ‘for the nth time.’ (Wolfe and Susi had a very ‘open’ relationship. They each had extramarital affairs, there were many bitter arguments and they parted often, sometimes for lengthy periods, during what was clearly a stormy time together. Yet there were also many periods of contentment and it was a union that lasted fifteen years, the longest of any of his marriages).
Throughout his adult life Wolfe’s culinary skills had been much admired and he decided to put them to good use by opening a restaurant called La Reja (meaning iron grill outside a window) which was, ‘located in a famous tourist spot amongst the snow white houses of Mijas’, a coastal village in the Spanish region of Malaga (see Plate 20).
The venture proved to be less than successful. Staff, customers and suppliers all took advantage of Frank’s lack of knowledge and naivety and his trusting nature. There was a temporary respite to the losses Wolfe was incurring when Susi arrived some months later. She kicked out Wolfe’s then current mistress and took charge of the management of La Reja. Soon they were at each other’s throats again and Wolfe records, ‘this time it knew no pause and went on to the end, but it raged for nearly five more years’.
As a diversion, ‘to fill an emotional vacuum Susi had created’ and appalled at the Spaniards widespread cruelty to animals – about which he is scathing – Wolfe set up his own unofficial animal refuge.
Things reached the lowest ebb over one Christmas period. After a heavy drinking session, and a particularly hurtful outburst by Susi, Wolfe attempted to take his own life (this was the second time he had tried to end it all). He records in his memoirs:
‘These lines would obviously not have been written if I had done things properly. Would-be-suicides please note that you must make sure you take the right dose. I took too much, namely: thirty sleeping tablets, thirty-six tranquilizers and twenty suppositories, plus a few odds and ends.’
Believing him to be suffering from a hangover, and even though a cat died after having licked the saliva trickling from his mouth, Susi left Wolfe to sleep it off – for thirty hours! It was eventually the maid who raised the alarm and, close to death, he was rushed to a private clinic in Malaga, where he eventually came round some fifty hours later and was released after five days. Following this Wolfe comments: ‘We never again returned to anything resembling the old-fashioned concept of marriage. We had sex occasionally, “to release glandular pressure,” as I was fond of saying.’
Soon after this incident things got even worse for Wolfe. He was arrested for a motoring offence he had committed some years earlier in Ibiza, and was chained to other prisoners ‘in full view of gaping tourists’ and marched through the busy streets of Malaga to be incarcerated in the local jail. There he spent a week ‘scared witless’ alongside some 500 inmates, including murderers, rapists, bank-robbers, drug dealers, addicts, drunks and embezzlers, until Susi was able to get him bail. ‘I had been in jail for seven days, four hours, and thirty-nine minutes,’ said a relieved Frank. On his return some months later for the court case Wolfe, after having been submitted to what he considered to be a doubtful hearing, was convicted of dangerous driving, given a six months suspended prison sentence and ordered to hand in his driving licence: ‘I sent them the licence they had recorded during the trial and went on driving using one of my other licences, being careful not to be caught, and I stayed away from trouble during my “parole”. I also decided that I had had enough of Spain and resolved to get out very rapidly.’
‘Under the weight of intolerable and unresolved conflagration between Susi and me,’ Wolfe departed for Andorra in the company of ‘an American enchantress named Caroline’, where his old friend Hermann Hemmeter (the Garden Dwarf) had settled. After further periods in Davos – to settle his affairs there – and Paris to take part in a number of orgies (graphically described) Wolfe’s notes tell us that he purchased some land in Andorra, sold his business in Spain and moved with his ‘sixteen cats and six dogs’ to a mountain retreat of Soldeu in Andorra where, on 4 February 1974, he opened a new restaurant, bar and disco complex called El Duc (the owl).
For two winters the business was a success. However, ‘thereafter the decline was staggering and summer number two was a disaster– simply tourism in Andorra was down, in fact, almost out.’ El Duc also suffered from ‘freezing pipes, collapsing power cable supports, landslides, cracking walls, moving floors and a disintegrating roof.’ There was also the old problem of untrustworthy staff and suppliers as well as problems with bankers and local authorities.
Wolfe had one other major problem. Susi was back on the scene and had pointed out to him her vulnerability should he die (he was then approaching sixty-five years of age). She explained: ‘No Andorran court would assume jurisdiction for a will, left by a British subject, married in Switzerland to a, then, German, and now British subject, both of whom held no more than a temporary permit to reside in Andorra.’ Subsequent to this the restaurant, land and other buildings were registered in Susi’s name. This in turn led to the rather sad final breakdown of the marriage and perhaps explains how in the final chapter of Wolfe’s story life was to become such a struggle for him. Without bitterness, however, he records:
‘This made it relatively simple for me to, finally, walk out on her: she now had everything I owned –and owed. (Over a number of years, she divested herself of it all, asserting that debts exceeded assets by far and that she had been terribly wronged. She never attempted to run the business, being a firm subscriber to the theory that men had a duty to look after her, and work was not her beer – surely the wrong philosophy for a lady restaurateur). So I departed, fortunately with somewhere to go – the Common Market, also known as the European Economic Community (EEC), in Brussels as an interpreter.’
Wolfe is scathing about the way the EEC was wasting money in general and about the way the translation and interpretation services were being run in particular. What follows is just one example he gives:
‘Each participant who has something to say will begin, “Thank you Mr Chairman for giving me the floor.” This then has to be simultaneously interpreted into all the other languages spoken, which at the time of writing, [c.1976] are: English, French, German, Dutch, Italian Danish and Greek. Therefore with this meaningless and superfluous bit of dogmatic drivel being repeated literally thousands of times every day, and based on the expenses needed to run the meeting (remuneration to delegates, interpreters, technicians, backroom and back up staff, room rent, electricity, etc.) it can safely be said that every year £1,367,000 (approximately) are used up by saying “thank you Mr Chairman etc” – I defy the critical reader to prove me wrong.’
Wolfe gives many other examples of EEC profligacy and accepts that he is, ‘biting the hand that fed him’ before he concludes his observations by explaining the terms under which he was employed: ‘My arrangement with the Commission was quite lucrative: they employed me for the maximum permitted twelve days per month and credited me with a first class rail ticket to Toulouse, which was now my professional domicile. I would work say Monday to Friday during two consecutive weeks (ten days) and then Monday/Tuesday in week three, or start on a Thursday plus Friday plus two five-day stints during the next two weeks. I did not, normally, go home for the in-between weekends.’