Adorno’s Years in California 303me to achieve something special in my work, if they were not combined
with a boundless capacity for suffering, for letting myself be carried
away, and loss of self-control. Since I have to think and react to every-
thing with the subtlest responses of which I am capable, it is easy to
understand that these reactions assume a violence that is not compatible
either with what common sense expects from a philosopher, or with an
ability to preserve the famous sense of proportion.’^142 He had finally
succeeded, he went on, in regaining his senses, not least thanks to the
‘undeserved understanding’ with which Gretel and Max responded to
the affair. That Adorno made no secret of his feelings is evident from
the fact that he announced that a friend of Renée Nell’s would visit his
parents in New York. This was the actress Irena Coryan, whose real
name was Ira Morgenroth and who was married to the art collector and
philosopher Stephan Lackner (i.e., Ernst Gustave Morgenroth), who
was friendly with Benjamin and Horkheimer as well as Adorno.
With the affair with Renée Nell happily or unhappily behind him
since early in 1943, Adorno started another love affair the following
year, on this occasion with a married woman. Whenever he travelled
to San Francisco to take part in the discussions on research on anti-
Semitism, he stayed over with a friend, Dr Robert P. Alexander, who
was also his regular doctor. Alexander was married, but the couple
were on the point of separating. Adorno fell in love with Charlotte
Alexander. On this occasion, too, he made no secret of it to Gretel, as
he in fact reported to his friend Hermann Grab in New York, at the
same time confiding that Charlotte resembled him in her outward
appearance and in her speech mannerisms. ‘We have enjoyed six months
of the most unclouded happiness imaginable.’^143 Either she came to
Los Angeles for the weekend or else Adorno met her in San Francisco.
What fascinated him about her, he said, was her aura. She radiated
a kind of magic: ‘It was as if the long-forgotten childhood promise of
happiness had been unexpectedly, belatedly fulfilled.’^144 When Charlotte
Alexander started to flirt with another man and the possibility of
another longer-term relationship began to appear, Adorno reacted with
jealousy and asked Grab to obtain information about this new rival. He
even went so far as to suggest introducing this man to other women
from the same circle of acquaintances, since what had to be avoided
at all costs was that he should end up thinking he ought to marry
Charlotte.^145 Adorno soon realized that his wishes had something ‘manic’
about them, since he wrote to Grab some six months later that ‘he had
finally regained his self-control’.^146
Needless to say, not all of Adorno’s relationships with women were
complicated and erotically involved. He greatly revered the actress
Luli Deste, Countess Goerz, who had been born Baroness Luli von
Bodenhausen. He had met her in mid-1943, but the relationship with
her was never more than platonic.^147 She was a very attractive, graceful
woman with bluish-grey eyes and brown hair. She was two years older