I have finished Maximilian Schell's autobiography entitled "I fly over dark valleys (Ich fliege über dunkle Täler)". It was one of those books that had been lying around for a while until the late Maximilian Schell's image was damaged because his niece (Maria Schell's daughter) claimed to have been abused by Maximilian Schell as a teenager. Of course, not everyone believed her accusations, so Maximilian Schell's daughter said that she too had been abused by her father as a teenager, because it was apparently a habit in the family that teenage girls were deflowered by an older family member.
This shocking news has taken away my admiration for Maximilian Schell, still I've finally decided to read his autobiography. Of course, everything is interesting and I would still find him very sympathetic if I didn't know that he was a predator. Apparently there were really dark valleys in his family, because his maternal grandfather was a psychiatrist in Vienna during the time of Freund and Jung and married two of his patients, so respect for women was not common. I was shocked when Maximilian Schell dedicated a section of his autobiography to the Michael Jackson abuse scandal. He wrote that he had traveled through the USA with his adopted son on vacation and that he had booked two rooms, but that the son did not want to be alone at night and wanted to sleep in Schell's bed. An outsider could have thought that Maximilian Schell had abused his stepson and that poor Michael Jackson (who Maximilian Schell had only met briefly once at an awards ceremony) was simply misunderstood. It now seems to me as if Maximilian Schell wanted to take precautions in case abuse allegations were made against him one day and that was the only reason he mentioned his stepson in their shared bed.
By the way, I always read several books at the same time and one of them is by the in this thread popular Arthur Hailey: Overload. It is a nice read, but the way it looks at energy production is no longer up to date.