2. "SILENCE IS SHAME"

In 1972 Ginetta Sagan appeared on my doorstep.  She was tiny, pleasantly chubby, with short black hair, huge luminous brown eyes, and the countenance of a sunburst. Under her arm-or rather, in her lap, because as I remember, she was sitting on a huge stone near the garden-she held a big messy bundle of documents. I remember very little of that meeting, except her heavy Italian accent, and grisly pictures of tortured prisoners from places like Turkey, Greece, South Africa, and Cuba.

Ginetta told me about something called Amnesty International and its work on behalf of all political prisoners, regardless of ideology, race, or religion.

Over the years that followed I learned about Ginetta's incredible past. I will print only a few details here, because she is finally writing the book we have all urged her to write for many years. In it will be the details of the horrors this tiny woman went through at the tender age of nineteen. A member of the anti-Nazi, anti-Fascist resistance in the north of Italy, she was arrested, and spent forty hideous days in prison undergoing .every form of torture used in those days to elicit information. She survived, barely.

Ginetta was born with the gifts of an active mind, a love of life and of beauty, an unquashable spirit, and a faith in people very much like that of Anne Frank. Her favorite expression, "There are so many beautiful people in the world!," reminds me so much of "I still believe that people are good at heart." I think she is speaking of herself.

Amnesty International, I finally understood after two or three visits by this persistent little Italian, was an organization which worked for the release of prisoners of conscience, namely, anyone imprisoned for reasons of ethnic origin, or religious or political beliefs, and who had never used or advocated violence. Amnesty also worked to free anyone from torture, no matter what the nature of their crime, and to abolish the death penalty. Amnesty had its headquarters in London, England, and a large office in New York. Ginetta wanted to create a thriving Amnesty International on the West Coast. And she wanted me to help her.

I do not need retrospective wisdom to know why I was so attracted to Amnesty: I needed to do some kind of work that produced tangible results. The things I had worked for all my life, and would go on working for, were things I would never see, like fewer nationstates and an end to the arms race. The Institute no longer stimulated me; it was filled with good souls who, since I traveled so much, had come to feel that it was in fact theirs, and that I was rather a nuisance of an absentee landlady. Ira and I had not been close since my marriage. Ginetta was a fireball of energy and compassion and a European intellectual, eager to share her knowledge and experiences with me. She had three sons; perhaps she would have liked a daughter.

I took a year out of my life to organize Amnesty International West Coast.

Oh, how we would laugh! I sat in Ginetta's guest room which we had made into an office, surrounded with documents and leaflets and pamphlets and indexes and files and literature on political prisoners. One day I answered the phone "Amnesty International," and when Ginetta came on the line the caller said, "Who's your secretary? She has such a pleasant speaking voice!"

We tore up and down the coast fund-raising, meeting with editorial boards, going to private homes and giving talks on how to form an Amnesty group.

Amnesty works as a network of groups. To be a group you had to get together, meet at least once a month, and register with Amnesty in London, which would send you the names of three prisoners: one from a left-wing country, one from a right-wing country, and one from a Third World country. Then you began a letter-writing campaign, doing anything you could think of to rattle the authorities in charge of your prisoner enough to let him or her out of detention. One group invented the idea of telephoning the jail collect and asking for their prisoner, person to person. A call was placed every hour on the hour around the clock. This trick would almost certainly put a halt to torture, at least temporarily, and often resulted in a release.

Groups began popping up like daffodils in springtime. I became a member of the National Advisory Board.

A CIA-backed coup took the life of Salvador Allende in Chile on September 11, 1973, and the repression which followed was monstrous. We concentrated on Chile as I devoted myself full-time to Amnesty, giving benefit concerts, accelerating the fund- raising. Exiled Chileans helped me plan my Spanish album.

We needed two thousand dollars to send a doctor and a lawyer to Santiago. We'd heard rumors of torture and murder and hoped to get information from inside the stadium where victims of the repression were being kept. Ginetta plowed through her Rolodex and out popped a card, like Cinderella's fairy godmother making a glass slipper appear with her magic wand.

The man was a distinguished, liberal, millionaire Italian, and he lived ten minutes away. I grabbed the address, jumped in the car and tore off without my shoes. Oh well, I thought halfway there, maybe he won't be stuffy. He was not. He was kind, elegant, served me tea, and pretended not to notice my bare feet. I left forty-five minutes after I'd arrived, with a personal check for one thousand dollars in my hand.

I learned what my limits as a fund-raiser were. I didn't have any.

Ginetta's husband and I went to see another local millionaire who turned out to be more interested in flirting with me than learning about Amnesty. Leonard and I, feeling we weren't getting anywhere with him, just kept insisting that he must meet Ginetta. Fine, he said, at last, and addressing me directly said, "Invite me to dinner."

"My pleasure," I replied. Then he proceeded to dictate to me his preferred menu. He obviously thought that I would be cooking.

"I want raw cucumbers sliced on a microtome."

''Fine,'' I said, with a wave of my hand, wondering what a microtome was.

"Then, I'd like braised brains."

''No problem."

"Pureed spinach with a dash of nutmeg."

'Yes, of course."

"And for dessert," he said, leaning forward, "for dessert I'd like a chocolate souffle. But I want you to cook two of them, placing the second one in the oven one minute after the first, so that if the first one collapses we have a back-up."

"Let me write all this down," I said dutifully, and did so. I couldn't glance at Leonard or we'd have collapsed into giggles.

"That all?" I asked cheerfully, and he responded by naming the wines of his choice.

Leonard and I nearly died when we finally got out into the fresh air.

"Do you believe that guy? Oh, my God! I can't wait to tell Ginetta! Good thing I've got Christine to do the cooking! He thinks I'm gonna cook! That'd be the bloody end of Amnesty West Coast! Ha Ha Ha! Boy, I hope he makes this worth our while!"

Christine, my guardian angel, British factotum, child-rearing expert, and cook, obliged. With certificates from any number of European cooking schools she was not the least bit fazed, but felt no love for our guest of honor. I told her it didn't matter, just to cut those cucumbers mighty thin, because whether or not we got a generous donation might depend on our being able to hold up a slice of cucumber and read a newspaper through it.

Dinner went flawlessly, except that, knowing he wanted to witness me gag over the braised brains, I had a hamburger. And Christine drew the line at one chocolate souffle, which dropped, I assumed, because she had hexed it. But she served it with perfect aplomb, as though it were meant to be sticking to the sides of the bowl and sunken like mud around the roots of a rose bush.

After dinner I whisked out my guitar and sang to him over aperitifs in the sitting room, while Ginetta and Leonard looked on dotingly.

He was not a generous millionaire. Perhaps he had expected more than I could, in good taste, offer. If he's reading this, he might like to know that the same amount he gave us for our trouble, I can make twenty times over at a brief appearance in a rock concert, even now. Oh, well, it was all in the game.

Night after night the four or five of us who constituted the office, plus volunteers, drove the hour to San Francisco to leaflet at the film State of Siege, by Costa-Gavras. The film exposed, among other things, the corrupt element in the AID program, which funded the' teaching of torture techniques in Latin and Central America. We solicited signatures against the use of torture, and educated people to the fact that torture was more prevalent than it had been since the middle ages, that the danger was its common use as government policy, and that, though at one remove, the hands of the U.S. government were far from clean.

I gave a concert for Melina Mercouri on behalf of Greek political prisoners, and went to New York and Paris for the first Campaign to Abolish Torture. It was attended by people from allover the world, and no one knew which direction it might go. At one point I took the microphone from a group which was trying to disrupt the meeting and discredit Amnesty, and sang a song. Order was restored, and I have been credited with having helped to squelch a potential disaster for A.I. At my concerts I arranged to have leaflets handed out containing the names of three prisoners, or the name of one special, urgent-action prisoner, with instructions as to whom and where to write demanding his or her release.

I decided to work directly with Amnesty until the day when any newspaper or radio talk show I approached would know what Amnesty International was, and when the facts, coming from London, were no longer disputed. It took only a year.

I have continued to go to vigils, concerts, and demonstrations for Mothers of the Disappeared, Andrei Sakharov, Anatoly Scharansky, and others, and against the death penalty. I remain on the National Advisory Board. Having brought up and nurtured Amnesty from when she was a baby, I feel very close to her. What a thrill to have been on the "Conspiracy of Hope" concert tour in 1986, A.I.'s twenty-fifth anniversary tour, with U2, Sting, Peter Gabriel and others. A.I.'s membership grew by 25,000 as a result of that tour.

Nearly fifteen years later, Ginetta and I remain very close. She has taught me diplomacy and restraint in my dealings with government officials, heads of state, and others I have often wanted to thumb my nose at. "Never close the door, you may need this person some day," is one of her favorite expressions. In 1983, at Newsweek's fiftieth anniversary celebration, I was seated across from Mary Mc Carthy at the head table. The big feature of the evening was a videotaped speech by Henry Kissinger. When he appeared on the big screen I stuffed my stockinged feet into their high heels and left the table, and stood in the lobby until it was finished. My moderation and diplomacy end where Henry's nose begins.

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