France Gives Highest Honor to U.S. Hero of Resistance

When Stephen J. Weiss, longtime Los Angeles resident, stood stiffly at attention Friday morning and was kissed on the cheeks by a French general, it was one more remarkable moment in a remarkable life.

An enlistee in the U.S. Army more than half a century ago. Began smoking because it was silly for an 18-year-old to suck his thumb. An infantry private in Italy during World War II. Participant in the invasion of southern France. Went AWOL in Grenoble, hoping to party with the locals, then rejoined his unit. Ended up fighting behind enemy lines with the French Resistance and the forerunner of the CIA.

Postwar, three strikingly different careers, as an editor at CBS and Consolidated Film Industries, as a Beverly Hills psychotherapist and, currently, as a London-based university lecturer and author on the raw realities of war.

“I never should have made it,” said Weiss, 74, nursing a beer in a Paris cafe and looking back on his life. “But I made it.”

Friday morning, Weiss was awarded the French Legion of Honor, becoming, according to high-ranking veterans of the French Resistance, the first American granted that distinction for having risked his life with this country’s wartime underground.

More than 30 friends and family members, including his three children--all UCLA graduates--and four of six grandchildren, looked on as a red-sashed French general pinned the red ribbon and white cross of France’s highest decoration on Weiss’ left lapel.

The country is dear to a man who lived for 47 years in Mar Vista.

“France has become my spiritual and cultural home,” Weiss said in a speech at the ceremony. The links have grown so intense that the veteran has left instructions that, upon his death, he is to be cremated and the ashes cast into the Rhone River, which flows through southern France to the Mediterranean.

These days, when news about France is more likely than not to be about a trade or diplomatic tiff with Washington, the honors paid Weiss were a reminder of the solid and durable relations that have prevailed between the countries since the American Revolution.

President Jacques Chirac, who presides over the Legion of Honor, specifically expressed the wish this year that more be done to “reward Franco-American friendship,” said Bernard Gilles, secretary-general of the Medal Holders of the French Resistance, to which Weiss already belonged. Weiss’ was one of three dossiers to be approved by the French head of state in May, Gilles said.

The ceremonies brought tears to Claudette Reynaud, 66, whose father hid Weiss and seven other American soldiers from the Nazis in the hayloft of their farm in southern France. She thought back to when she was an 11-year-old girl and Weiss and the other young foreigners in olive drab came bolting through a peach orchard, desperate for shelter.

“I have felt a lot of emotions, thinking about those Americans who came to save us,” Reynaud said. “With this medal today, it is all of those Americans who are honored.”

In a real sense, though, Weiss’ actions in southern France are only one reason that the former GI was singled out for an award already granted 3,000 Americans in various walks of life, from former President Reagan to composer Quincy Jones.

“Mr. Weiss is still doing things,” Gilles said. “That is being rewarded as well.”

A Brooklyn native, son of a policeman and a Macy’s employee, Weiss had been hoping to find the father figure he yearned for in the wartime Army, but he didn’t. Peace left him bewildered about what he should do with his life, he says. He spent 13 years in psychoanalysis.

Inside himself, he found the drive and courage to achieve in numerous fields, earning over time a bachelor’s degree from the Los Angeles Art Center School, a master’s in clinical psychology from Goddard College in Vermont and, four years ago, a doctorate in war studies from King’s College in London. Now a visiting research fellow at King’s College, Weiss shuttles between London and his sister’s home in Northridge.

“Retirement for you was synonymous with a new career at university,” Gen. Jean Simon, chancellor of the French Order of Liberation, told Weiss on Friday before decorating him and embracing him. “So far, you have had a very full life, serving France . . . serving memory, serving peace in Europe and serving the friendship between our two countries.”

After coming ashore on the Mediterranean shore of Provence in August 1944, Weiss and seven other men of the 36th Texas Infantry Division were separated from their unit during a fierce firefight with the Germans. They hid in the loft of the Reynauds’ farmhouse, then donned ill-fitting blue uniforms of the French police and were driven through German lines.

Weiss still remembers the surrealism of seeing enemy soldiers gaze through the windows, and soberly realizing that he might be shot dead at any time.

“At 18 or 19, you can survive or get killed. It’s just random,” he said. Since then, he said, he has adopted the outlook of Zen Buddhism: “There is nothing to hold onto. There is no safe haven.”

In the small village of Alboussiere, Weiss was introduced to a captain in the Resistance, Francois Binoche, who had lost his arm in a gunfight. With only three years of French from his Brooklyn high school to help him communicate, Weiss was taken along on a mission to blow up a road bridge, where he stood guard with an old breech-loading rifle, and on an expedition to hunt for enemy stragglers.

Later that August, he was recruited by a captain in the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, for behind-the-lines missions with the French.

Through mid-September that year, Weiss helped cut telephone lines in southern France, guarded the OSS’ radio operator and went on night missions to recover material dropped to the Resistance by parachute.

After the war, Weiss kept in contact with the underground fighters and ordinary French people he had met, and came back to the scenes of his wartime exploits whenever he felt in need of “replenishment.”

For the Weiss family, Friday’s ceremony, held at the Paris museum honoring the French Resistance, was a joyous moment in a year that also has been marked by loss and sorrow. The very month Chirac approved the decoration for Weiss, the woman he had been married to for 23 years died at age 68. They had been divorced since 1982 but remained close, Weiss said. Rosemary Valaire had been a former soloist with Britain’s Royal Ballet and co-owner of the respected Westside School of Ballet in Santa Monica.

As Weiss was decorated, his chin trembled with emotion. Still so touched by events more than half a century ago that he cries when recalling how a favorite sergeant was killed in action, he said he was accepting the honor in part for his comrades in arms, both American and French.

For his eldest daughter, Claudia, 39, who flew from her home in Seattle to be present at the ceremony, it was a supremely proud moment. “I said to my dad, ‘Unless my daughter wins an Oscar, none of us are going to top this,’ ” she said.