‘Mrs Libgott from Huizen is becoming a national figure,’ reported Fidelity in 1968. In that year, the candidate of Per second hand television history by winning the quiz with the highest prize money ever paid out in a Dutch quiz game: 5,530 guilders.
With a break, the quiz Per second hand on television for fifty-five years. One of the first winners, Mrs. Liliane Libgott-Nochimovsky (Paris, 1922), celebrated her centenary this Tuesday. Reason enough to visit the quiz winner, who captivated many TV viewers at the end of the sixties, in Huize Vogelenzang, the Gooise villa hidden in a lush shade where she still lives.
Already after the second round, interviews with Mrs. Libgott appeared in the newspapers. In it she said that she received a lot of mail and phone calls from fans. And then the real Libgott mania had yet to begin. Her husband was also interviewed, and quizmaster Berend Boudewijn, who visibly sympathized with her on TV. She was recognized everywhere, an admirer came to decorate her house for free, another gave her a four-poster bed.
Now Mrs. Libgott is sitting in her armchair with a birthday cake saucer on the back. She can no longer hear and see well, but the mind is fresh and clear as ever. She thinks mixed up in French, English and Dutch, she says. But she prefers to tell in English, the mother tongue of her late husband. Her granddaughter and son-in-law are among them. They have decorated the centenarian’s room, poured tea, and sometimes shouted clarification in Grandmother’s ear.
She can’t remember the wallpaper and the four-poster bed. “I do know that someone had made a portrait of me. He had copied a picture from the newspaper. I sent it back, with a note: ‘Thank you, but I can’t receive portraits’.”
Looking back, Ms. Libgott calls the years of her short-lived fame “a difficult time”: “In those years there were only two channels, so everyone was watching. In the street people said: ‘Hey, I saw you on television’. Even on vacation. That had its pleasant sides. I went to buy wall lamps, but I didn’t have enough money with me. They said, ‘No problem, we know who you are.’ Even in Paris, a man came to my sister’s shop who knew me from TV. He said: ‘Quelle douceur! So sweet! Nice, but if something like this goes on for two or three years, it starts to get boring. I thought: Yes yes, now there are other people on TV.”
Little charming Frenchwoman
Libgott’s fame had to do with an attractive contradiction. To begin with, she was awestruck by her triumph and her great knowledge. In five broadcasts, she got only two out of 184 questions wrong. The papers called her “the history phenomenon,” “a boulder in history.” At the same time, she remained sober and extremely modest. She didn’t really want to participate in the quiz, she said in interviews at the time, but her family had urged her: “My husband and children were under the illusion that I knew everything.” But that was nonsense, she insisted. She hadn’t studied, she wasn’t a teacher, and she only read history books as a hobby: “It’s just a form of leisure, like someone else likes cars.”
She was also a TV genius. The newspapers called her “the charming little Frenchwoman”, “striking and intelligent”. The accent of the born Parisienne, and the French and English words with which she seasoned her sentences, added to the charm. Mrs. Libgott now says: “The other candidates were middle-aged men, I was a young, foreign woman who was enthusiastic and did not speak Dutch very well. They liked that.”
I thought: Yes yes, now there are other people on TV
When her husband, the Canadian KLM pilot Wilf Libgott, was walking around Schiphol around that time, he heard two desk employees say: ‘Look, there is Mrs Libgott’s husband’. That took some getting used to for him, says Mrs. Libgott now. Pilots were highly regarded, so “Captain Libgott” was treated with all due respect. She was usually the wife of.
The couple met in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Paris was already liberated. As a Canadian war pilot, Wilf Libgott had to make an emergency landing with his Dakota because of ice on the wings. The girl from the French welcome committee who helped him further was 22-year-old Liliane Nochimovsky. He immediately asked her to a dance that night. “He was a tall man, not a good dancer. At eleven I took him to the subway. And he kissed my hand. That made an impression. When I got home in the evening, I told my mother. She said, “Is he Jewish?” I said, ‘No, he’s very handsome’.”
On the run
The Parisienne had had a bad wartime. Mrs. Libgott now: “As a Jew you were something despicable. There were posters in the subway saying ‘We must sweep up the Jews to keep our houses clean’. We tried to be invisible. My father’s bank account was frozen, our house was taken by a German and his French mistress. All furniture was stolen. I had a chick-shaped egg cup that I loved. Also gone.” Her parents had a luxury furniture store in Paris before the war. They were driven from Belarus and the Ukraine at the end of the nineteenth century. Now they had to flee again, passing various addresses in France, ending in the French Alps. The whole family survived the war.
After the first meeting, it took another three years before the war lovers found each other. The Canadian pilot first had to return to Canada. Ms Libgott: ‘We kept writing to each other, and one day he wrote: ‘We are starting to love each other very much, but I am Jewish and I can only marry a Jewish girl’. He thought I was Russian. And so I thought he was too handsome to be Jewish.”
In 1947, Libgott returned to Europe to work for KLM. The two got married and went to live in the Netherlands. “After our wedding we flew to Amsterdam. That was the first time I went abroad, the first time I flew – that day I did a lot of things for the first time. My husband had booked a room at the Amstel Hotel. He didn’t know it was expensive.” She liked the Netherlands: “Everyone was so nice and so honest. Also to me, a foreigner. No one tried to rip me off when it could have been easily done. All the houses had white net curtains with a plant in the middle, and all the curtains were open. Very different from Paris.”
At the auditions for the Per second hand it turned out that as a Frenchwoman she didn’t know much about Dutch history. „I had never heard of the ‘Peat ship of Breda’. And who said: ‘Then rather take to the air’? No idea. My children said: ‘You didn’t answer: Albert Plesman?’” That was the founder of KLM. “I borrowed a booklet about the Dutch history from my daughter Ava two weeks before the recordings started. We went on vacation in Florida and then I read it on the beach.”
She had never seen a studio from the inside, so she was amazed. Presenter Berend Boudewijn was very “generous, nice and personable”: “Sometimes he made a joke that I did not understand”. Per second hand was recorded one and a half hours before broadcast in those days, in Studio A in Hilversum. That gave Mrs. Libgott the opportunity to drive home and see herself on TV, in the hobby room of the house, where the television set was. She did not find that undivided pleasure. At the time, she said in interviews: “All those gestures and grimaces, I look like a movie star.” “That is typically French, I was told.”
What did she do with the prize money? Converted to now it was about thirteen thousand euros. “I got letters from viewers saying, ‘Your husband earns more in a day than I earn in a month. So give the prize money to this and that charity.’ Most of it went to taxes, I donated some to charities, and the rest I bought a used car.”
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