Lady of Letters

First there had been Hilda Kruger, the actress. Then came Hilda, the seductive, blonde spy suspect. Now Mexico was getting used to Hilda, the writer. Last week her second book (Eliza Lynch or Tragic Destiny) hit the stands. It was a gushing tribute to Eliza Alicia Lynch, the tempestuous, French-Irish mistress of 19th Century Paraguayan Dictator Francisco Solano Lopez.

As a young German actress (Max Reinhardt started her at 14), Hilda first learned about destiny, did a good deal to shape her own. She played before Hitler and Goering. In London she met Anthony Eden, and this brought the Gestapo around. She told them what she has since told other snoopers: "I do not make politic." In St. Moritz for the skiing, Hilda was introduced to U.S. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. He helped her get a visa to the U.S. in 1939.

Hollywood was unkind to Hilda because she would not play in anti-Nazi films ("after all, my family was still there"). A rejected suitor denounced her to the FBI. Hilda went to Mexico, became a Mexican citizen.

Spy Stuff. As Senorita Kruger, Hilda got around with the right, big-time politicians, soon picked up Spanish. She also did a few films. Then came war--and with it, the undeserved Nazi tag again.

At the University of Mexico, where she studied sedulously, a professor asked: "But Senorita Kruger, you go to school day and night and you also act in the cine; when do you find time to do your spying?" Weekending in summery Cuernavaca, Hilda was called on by the town police. Hotel servants had dug out of her luggage suspicious accounts of troop movements: notes from her university course on Cortes' conquest of Mexico.

As an artist and intellectual, Hilda now shuns Ciro's bar and others of the gayer spots. Except for a lingering lunch at the quiet Ambassadeurs, she sticks to her comfortable apartment in tree-graced Calle Londres. The deep blue walls assuage her spirit, set off her shining blonde hair.

Tragic Destiny was not likely to upset any literary reputations. The story of the demimondaine who sparked the Paraguayan Napoleon to dreams of empire and simultaneous war with Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil had been better and more fully told in English (William E. Barrett: Woman on Horseback). But Hildas thin volume was good reading and it might sell to Mexican movies. If it did, Hilda the actress would undoubtedly want to go with it.

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